There is a scene in Israeli filmmaker Duki Dror’s “The Journey of Vaan Nguyen” that is stunning in its simplicity.
Two 9-year-old Israeli girls are playing on a sandlot. Jamila is of Arabic ancestry and Hung Waa is of Vietnamese heritage. As they play on swings, they’re subjected to a barrage of verbal taunts from a group of boys playing nearby. The two girls never avert their gaze from one another, drawing strength from each other’s steely reserve.
“I know you,” Hung Waa says to Jamila. “When you get angry, you hit.”
The irony is that their tormenters are themselves recent immigrants from Russia.
“The scene is really a microcosm of Israeli immigrant society,” said Dror during a recent phone interview from his home in Bin Yamina. “I’ve always been attracted to stories about people who live between cultures, and are pulled by their connections to different places.”
Dror, himself the son of an Iraqi immigrant to Israel, has made a richly textured documentary that’s a commentary on the universal immigrant experience. The film showed recently at the University of San Francisco and was sponsored by the Israeli Consulate General of San Francisco.
At the core of the documentary is the Nguyen family, who immigrated to Israel from war-torn Vietnam during the early ’70s. The so-called “boat people” were turned down by several nations before gaining admission to Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who authorized the immigrants’ entry, compared their plight to the persecution of Jews throughout history.
Grainy black and white footage from that era depicts disoriented immigrants paying rapt attention to an Israeli instructor playing Chanukah songs on an accordion. The instructor is as baffled as his students, asking if they would prefer the songs in English or Japanese.
Besides demonstrating a gift for focusing on intimate moments that illustrate larger truths, Dror’s film has another compelling attribute: its narrator.
Vaan Nguyen is an Israeli citizen who disparages a society she can’t fully assimilate into, and yet a trip to Vietnam leaves her hankering to return “home” — to Israel.
Not only is the 20-year-old Nguyen photogenic, but she’s a gifted writer whose poetic musings on her family’s history are both haunting and touching.
At one point, Nguyen transforms her anger at being ostracized by Israeli society into a spoken-word rap:
“I don’t deny the Holocaust/I don’t think my eyes are slanted because I eat rice every day/No, I don’t comb my hair a hundred times a day … ”
The myriad emotions Nguyen faces when visiting Vietnam is fascinating. Overwhelmed with nostalgia, she writes that Vietnam was like a “thick blanket I could cuddle in and sleep well.”
The hazy gauze of nostalgia unravels quickly, however, when Nguyen exhorts her father to reclaim the land he had to abandon at gunpoint. In a poignant scene, Hoimai Nguyen finally confronts the man who put a gun to his head and told him to leave the town “or else.”
Now elderly, the man pats Hoimai on the shoulder and says, “Forget about the past … that’s all behind us now.” He urges Hoimai to return to Vietnam (although without any land) because “you can go far, but you can never forget your village.”
The disdain Vaan Nguyen has for the man who threatened to kill her father is palpable, as is her ambiguity toward her father’s reluctance to claim what his rightfully is. (The longing to return to ancestral lands evokes inevitable comparisons to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.)
By the end of the trip, Vaan Nguyen has another epiphany. “I don’t consider myself a part of all these slant-eyed faces, but I’m aware I fit in with my looks. But I’m here as a tourist … as an Israeli.”
The themes that permeate “The Journey of Vaan Nguyen” resonate with the filmmaker himself.
“Being an immigrant can mean a new lease on life, as it was in my father’s case, and as it was for the Nguyen family,” said Dror. “But it can also produce a profound sense of isolation, and that’s what I wanted to depict in my film.”
“The Journey of Vaan Nguyen” can be purchased on DVD through Amazon.com.