NEW YORK CITY, August 10 - Her Vietnamese name is Thi Thanh Nga, but throughout a career that has taken her from Bruce Lee's training gym and low-budget films she became Tiana Alexandra and sometimes Tiana Banana. Today, as an emerging figure in documentary filmmaking she has gone back to her homeland and simply become Tiana.
Tiana's critically acclaimed "From Hollywood to Hanoi," which took 13 trips to film and five years to complete, is the story of her journey to Vietnam to find her roots, her family and come to terms with a paradoxical childhood.
As a visiting artist at the College, Tiana is working on a sequel, appropriately named "From Hanoi to Hanover: Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda" in which she solicits the reactions of Dartmouth students to her documentary.
Taping in fraternity basements and speaking with students, Tiana said she hopes to foster greater cultural exchange.
Upon returning from Vietnam in 1992, Tiana came to Dartmouth. College students became Tiana's first true audience and since then she has become intrigued with their reactions to the film.
Good-bye Vietnam, Hello U.S.
Tiana left Hanoi in 1966 at the age of four before the massive evacuation by the United States government. Her father, the former Minister of Information of the puppet run and U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government, and her mother were among the million Vietnamese who immigrated to America.
Torn between two worlds--her Vietnamese background and the Western culture she knew for most of her life--the movie is her attempt to calm the evils that have resided in her memory and in her family.
During her return, Tiana managed to incorporate interviews with some of the most infamous and inaccessible North Vietnamese generals and leaders during the Vietnam War.
Pham Van Dong, Le Duc Tho, who refused to accept the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize with then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and an elderly and worn General Westmoreland are among those shown in the film.
On screen, Tiana is heroine, director, rebel, producer and actor, she powerfully depicts her tour of Vietnam in search of her uncle, a former minister of defense for the South Vietnamese government who was recently released from a North Vietnamese "re-education camp", and interviews survivors of the My Lai massacre.
Old and New
"I still remember the robes and the smell of burning flesh," Tiana says in the film while pictures of self-immolating Buddhist priests flash before the audience's eyes.
The images of Vietnam, often seen in old movies and documentaries of post-war culture, is refreshed with Tiana's travels and experiences giving the film a feeling of here-and-now rather than of the past.
The footage of her father is most telling. He discourages her from returning to Vietnam to do the film and speaks of his feelings towards the Communists and the atrocities he said they committed.
Torn between her two worlds, Tiana tries to bridge the gap in her documentary. Entering Vietnam with a British Broadcasting Company camera-man, Tiana started her journey with a poem.
"My poem, 'Dear Vietnam, Dear America,' is meant to convey the complete isolation between the two countries," Tiana said, rubbing her eyes. "What we think of as Vietnam are the Hollywood productions because of the U.S. trade embargo. We've been punishing them for 20 years because they won the war."
The name of her production company--Friendship Bridge Productions--silently illustrates her purpose in the documentary.
Even at the movie theater where the film is showing, Tiana is not shy to get up in front of the audience to speak and tell her story.
"There are 70 million people who want to be our friends," she said to the crowd who were evidently not prepared for her appearance. "There is no remorse on their side. What's done is done - they want to get on with their lives."
The Film Maker
"I am not a lobbyist. I'm just a film maker - I just paint the painting," Tiana said. "The Vietnamese have never been seen as a people. It's a very positive step to ask questions. Nonfiction filmmakers should ask these questions. I'd rather be illuminated and unhappy than dumb and unhappy."
Whether tired or hungry, Tiana appears to be determined to show the real war, the real people, the real relations rather than the politics. Wherever she goes, war veterans from both sides of the world praise her work and courage and offer any help she needs. This brings a smile to her face, she said.
This smart and courageous woman in her '30s, who is trying to reconcile battling factions within, has literally sold her life to make "From Hollywood to Hanoi" and lived without a home to see it through.
She has lived on a futon working late hours for the last two years at Du Art Film Labs to see her story through.
"There's a cause. There's a mission," she said with a cracked and soft voice - an inevitable consequence of all the interviews. "I'm the Pied Piper. Destruction of the family is a prevalent disease in America too."
It is not remorse that prompted Tiana to make the film, she said. It comes from a deeply rooted interest in who she is, even after her parents encouraged her to assimilate.
"At school kids would say, 'What are you, a gook or a V.C.?'" she said. "Vietnamese was not a feel-good word, and I felt better being an American."
The Future
While American companies "move in for the kill" in Vietnam during a time of improved relations in the shadow of Clinton's initiative to lift the economic and cultural embargo, Tiana is working to bring the two countries closer together by amending differences and curbing myths prevalent in both societies.
Concerned with Amer-Asian orphans in both countries, any money that Tiana was able to make from her film went toward a fund that helps to bring Amer-Asians to the United States.
"We lost a country. We didn't chose to come here. We came as refugees from a war," she said.
"I have sold everything I have," she said. "I'm not really afraid of anything. It doesn't matter."
The movie will open in September in Washington, D.C. and Tiana said she will be there every weekend to make people aware of the movie and the issues surrounding the war that ended 20 years ago.
Tiana however realizes the obstacles that face her; but with the same amount of energy, initiative and love that she put into her documentary, Tiana is building other bridges.
"My father and I have our differences," she said. "Somewhere between the U.S. and Vietnam, there's a lot of love."
