Boat People: Becoming Refugees

Boat People’s opening sequence declares Hui’s commitment to the ordinary people who bear the brunt of war. The first image introduces Akutagawa (George Lam), the film’s protagonist, as he photographs the military procession marking the Communist liberation of Da Nang. As Akutagawa intently captures the soldiers and tanks parading triumphantly through the street, his photographic lens—and Hui’s cinematic camera—comes to rest on a boy with a maimed leg limping away from the crowd. Akutagawa follows him and takes a photo of his silhouette moving slowly down an empty alleyway. This powerful opening visualizes the gap between appearance and reality, setting the official story against the lived one.

Three years later, when Akutagawa returns to Vietnam to document the country’s reconstruction, the guides who oversee his official visit are acutely aware that the Japanese photographer’s images will become important mediations between Vietnam and the rest of the world. But after a visit to one of the regime’s New Economic Zones, where a group of schoolchildren perform happiness for his camera, Akutagawa meets a fourteen-year-old girl, Cam Nuong (Season Ma), on the streets of Da Nang. He eventually follows Cam Nuong to a bloody execution ground where people gather to strip the executed of their remaining valuables, and to a landfill to watch people forage for scrap metal, where they both witness her brother’s gruesome death from an unexploded ordnance. Akutagawa’s desire to see the reality of life in postwar Vietnam propels him. And to see how Vietnamese people live—or are unable to live—is to understand their motivation for seeking refuge elsewhere. For Akutagawa, this vision is terrifying in its brutal revelation, complicating his innocent desire to look and see.

But Hui’s film does not allow Akutagawa—and viewers—to turn away from the violence. After witnessing scenes of poverty and repression, Akutagawa comes to the realization that, for many people, postwar Vietnam is unlivable. Transforming from observer to participant, he resolves to find passage out of Vietnam on a boat for Cam Nuong and her little brother. To fund the escape, he sells his camera—his source of livelihood and agency, an instrument of his very vision. His earlier wish to see turns into a desire to assist, because vision demands action.

“It was a revelation to be given this cinematic portal into the past, one that turned history into film and now exists as a historical document of a formative moment for me and many Vietnamese refugees.”

And it is this vision that destroys Akutagawa. In the final moments of the film, while carrying a can of diesel fuel to Cam Nuong’s boat, he is shot by police patrols and bursts into flames. While it may be tempting to interpret Akutagawa as a self-sacrificing savior, his death at this crucial moment does not emphasize his heroism so much as the perils of life in, and escaping from, Vietnam. Akutagawa’s horrifying immolation as the boat speeds away into the dark of night casts these refugee journeys as a pressing matter of life and death.

Boat People was released in the year of my birth. The film depicts the world that I was born into, and it is a bittersweet experience to watch this world on-screen. I, too, would leave home and become a boat refugee, in the late eighties. I, too, would come to know the unbearable loss the film speaks of. It took me many years to find Hui’s film, and to see fragments of my own personal experience reflected in her narrative. It was a revelation to be given this cinematic portal into the past, one that turned history into film and now exists as a historical document of a formative moment for me and many Vietnamese refugees. The film explained to me the milieu of my own leaving—filling in the gaps of my memory. I have yet to find another one like it, a film that focuses on the perspectives of asylum seekers at a time when they were scattering across the world, looking for ways to survive.