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"The Journey of Vaan Nguyen” / film review by Yuval Rivlin

Director: Duki Dror
Israel, 2005, 84 minutes

One powerful poem reverberated in my head while watching “The Journey of Vaan Nguyen”. A poem which tells of a holocaust survivor going back to search for the ruins of her home. A sad resemblance exists between this journey to the hopeless journey in the film. A journey of a Vietnamese refugee family going back to the land from which they were torn more than 20 years ago.

Immigrants and refugees of any origin and of all times, have in common - the undying yearning for roots and images of a homeland. A person driven away from home will never grasp the concept of ‘home’ lightly. This who was forced to leave one home will never feel safe again in a new home.

“The Journey of Vaan Nguyen” describes a crucial period in the life of the Nguyen family. Hoimai Nguyen and his wife escaped Vietnam in a refugee boat and arrived at the Israeli shores, where he and other refugees were granted asylum. Hoimai’s seven children were born in Israel. Two died at birth. Five girls were raised in an Israeli surrounding and developed a complex and split identity.

The film starts at the time when Hoimai decides it’s time to go back home to Vietnam. The longing, the constant feeling of foreignness and the need to go back home, carries him to the muddy roads of his home village. He sets out to get back the family lands which were confiscated at the time of communist regime. At the same time, his daughters are starting to question their own identities. They each have to test their sense of belonging.

“The Journey of Vaan Nguyen” enables us to weigh, in the most direct and clear way, the components which make us connect our fate with one specific place. Vaan, the main character in the film and Hoimai’s daughter, explains in a sharp monologue, her identity and feelings of foreignness as a result of the different look of the Vietnamese family. Although she feels totally Israeli and Hebrew is the language in which she thinks, Vaan wants to go back to Vietnam with her father because that’s the only place where she would not feel like she is wearing a mask. In Vietnam her slanted eyes will not draw any attention. She wasn’t born there but that’s where her children might be born. To those far away lands, which she does not know yet, to that land her soul yearns.

With much persistence and sensitivity, director Duki Dror follows the journey of Vaan and of her family. His camera is present at painful and intimate family moments, such as when the youngest of the girls realizes that she has to make a choice between going back to Vietnam with her parents and staying in Israel with her sisters. The camera is there also at the cruel moments of realization, when the place which they longed for is neither glorious not majestic.

The dissonance between Hoimai’s glowing face and the look of the miserably poor wooden shacks at the heart of the jungle, the place he calls home, makes clear that home is not a geographical place but is a totally subjective state of consciousness. His “Don-Quixote journey” will not stop Hoimai from fantasizing his dream home, but the film leads to the cruel awakening, as it reflects in his daughter.

“The Journey of Vaan Nguyen” is one of the best and most powerful documentary films created here in recent years. As opposed to the cliché so common in road-movies - where an external journey turns into an inward one, this film does not offer any optimistic process of maturation.

In a fluent and a fascinating style, interwoven with archival footage haunted by the Vietnam war and the awkward welcome of the refugees in Israel, Dror treats intelligently one side of the “agony of Israeliness”.

The story of the Nguyen family is a story of Israeliness, not only through the story of the “other” that live with us, but also since it creates a mirror through which the story of return is reflected through the journey of refugees who belong to a different tale. The painful decision, to put away the “wandering cane” does not heal the constant sense of foreignness, and as the young daughter of Hoimai puts it: “not all can be realized in this world.”

(Makor Rishon 02/10/05)

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