The Vietnam War has been fodder for films from Oliver
Stone’s gritty hyperrealism in “Platoon” to
Robert Zemeckis’ revisionist tale “Forrest Gump.”
But rarely has the war been seen from the Vietnamese side, with a
concentration on their struggles, their culture and their
families.
UCLA film graduate student Ham Tran aims to change that.
So when it came time to shoot his thesis film, Tran, who was
born in Vietnam even though he is Chinese by blood, had his eyes
set on his native land.
“I was going to try to shoot it in America if I could but
so much of it is about Vietnam,” Tran said. “I really
needed the look of Vietnam to give it its flavor.”
His film, “The Anniversary,” is about a Buddhist
monk who remembers his brother on the anniversary of his death.
It has a quiet grandeur fueled by its beautiful photography
(Tran enlisted cinematographer Guillermo Rosas, whose credits
include “Before Night Falls”), the acting of its native
Vietnamese cast, and the beautiful setting within a Buddhist
temple. This is the Vietnam War film we haven’t seen, where
the Vietnamese are the main characters and where the war
doesn’t always take place in swampy jungles.
“I specifically said no jungles, because I’m sick of
jungles,” said Tran, who filmed his war scenes in rocky
terrain. “I wanted to break away from that (Vietnam War)
stereotype because war happened everywhere.”
Going to Vietnam to shoot a film requires planning, patience,
government permission (a censor followed Tran’s production to
make sure no war footage was shot) and, most of all, money.
Earlier this month Tran was one of five filmmakers to receive
grants from the Caucus for Television Producers, Writers &
Directors Foundation, but even the $10,000 he received was used
mainly to finish his already expensive short film. This was in
addition to the $25,000 grant from UCLA’s James Bridges
Foundation, which allowed Tran the luxury of going to Vietnam in
the first place.
The world of student filmmaking is a fiercely competitive one
that requires grants and awards to fuel the completion of projects.
Many of the projects never get completed and are submitted merely
as “works in progress.” To finish a film, the fade-ins
and outs, the addition of sound design and music, and even the
creation of opening title sequences cost money. Students, such as
Tran, edit their own films both to learn the craft and to cut down
on costs.
With filmmakers constrained by logistical concerns, films often
reflect the difficult process rather than the clean, ideal world of
film theory. Thinking about film in vacuum could never have
prepared Tran for an obstacle like the Vietnamese government.
“I took a lot of film classes, like theoretical and
critical studies classes, and got really sick of it in terms of
trying to theorize how a film is made instead of making it,”
Tran said.
Tran lived in Vietnam until he moved to America at the age of 8.
During his undergraduate years at UCLA, he was an English student
although his passion was always film. After getting rejected from
the undergraduate film school, he graduated and spent a year
working on playwriting with a Vietnamese performance group, Club of
Noodles. Tran was then accepted to the graduate film school and
hopes to end his academic career here with the completion of
“The Anniversary,” his thesis film.
Tran is now working on his first feature length screenplay,
“Fire in the Lake,” which he hopes to direct one day.
His dream may be a step closer to coming true after the
“Fire” script became a finalist in the Sundance Film
Lab (he is one of 700 finalists drawn from 5000 applicants), where
upcoming filmmakers get connections with producers who can help
people like Tran get a film made. The “Fire” script is
about Vietnamese boat people who fled the Communist regime only to
find persecution in other countries. As with “The
Anniversary,” Tran hopes to illuminate the way we look at
Vietnam. Â
“I cannot let an American person tell the stories of my
people,” Tran said. “You can have the Oliver Stones in
there who are going to make their films, and it becomes an
exoticized, romanticized, or victimized version of what these
people went through. All I’m searching for is a level of
honesty in portrayal of what we had to go through as a
people.”