Mal Vincent Review of Making Peace with Viet Nam - Published in The Virginian-Pilot

Film seeks peace but may get controversy

Director: Steven Emmanuel.

Cinematography: Matt Ryan and Steven Emmanuel.

By Mal Vincent
The Virginian-Pilot
© September 19, 2008

More than 30 years have passed since Vietnam and Americans still have not come to terms with the war that was waged there.

A rare and probing movie directed by a Virginia Wesleyan College philosophy professor and made by a team of about five local students seeks passionately to make some sense of the conflict - and to bring it to a close. "Making Peace With Vietnam," produced with no budget and a lot of commitment, gets three showings on Virginia Wesleyan's campus tonight and Saturday. It seeks peace but may well get controversy.

The results of Agent Orange and napalm are shown via deformed children and grave sites. Yet, the film shows us a Vietnamese people who do not hate Americans. They have moved on; can Americans do the same?

Dr. Steven Emmanuel, who teaches philosophy, not film- making, said the friendly Vietnamese presented in his film are not the result of pandering or editing.

"I never encountered anyone who had anything negative to say. They don't like to talk about the war, but they are not bitter about it either. I went there with no agenda. This is what I found. It, apparently, is a cultural thing. They are a culture that tends to live in the present."

Emmanuel went to Vietnam in 2006 with research and illumination as his goal. He had never been to Asia and wanted to examine the possibility of students going there to experience a culture in a developing nation.

He returned with cameraman Matt Ryan and five students for three months in summer 2007, with brief revisits in January and May. The result is the beautifully photographed film "Making Peace With Vietnam."

"It is not intended to be an anti-war film. It was what we found there," Emmanuel said.

Aided in editing by Stu Minnis and the location translator, Lan Tran, both associated with Virginia Weslyan, the filmmakers captured a picture that is both encouraging and threatening to Americans in 2008. Most central is the question posed by one Vietnamese to the camera: "You can be a compassionate winner, but can you be a compassionate loser?"

We hear the story of Vietnamese veterans who approach returning American vets with the comment: "You were the enemy. It's OK. You did your duty."

An American veteran who went back to find closure comments that "the Vietnamese people have left the war behind. I never met one Vietnamese who expressed anger or hatred. They don't blame the American people for what happened here."

Can this be believed? Emmanuel says that "it is what we found. If we had found otherwise, we would have recorded it."

But America comes out as looking unsettled on the topic. A monk claims that "America has learned nothing from Vietnam," referring directly to another, current war. "You cannot make peace with Vietnam because you have not made peace with yourself."

Emmanuel said the film is entirely a personal, private research project independent of the college or of any particular school. A grant from Asian Network defrayed the costs, but the film has no budget for distribution. It is being sent to film festivals in hopes of finding a distributor. Tonight's 8 p.m. screening is largely sold out.

The Saturday screening will be followed by a discussion. It is likely to be a lively one. In spite of general efforts to have this war recede from our consciousness, this locally produced film treads where Hollywood fears to go.

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com

Portfolio Weekly Review of Making Peace with Viet Nam

Making Peace With Vietnam
Locally-made film explores lingering consequences of war
D. D. Delaney

MAKING PEACE WITH WAR: Dr. Steve Emmanuel will host post-screening discussion.

A philosophy professor at Virginia Wesleyan College with no budget, no experience as a film-maker, and a skeletal crew of four has written, directed, and in large part shot and edited a powerful, feature-length documentary which examines the "lingering consequences" of the Vietnam War—on Vietnamese and Americans alike—more than 30 years after the U.S. withdrawal.

Dr. Steve Emmanuel’s Making Peace with Vietnam premiered last month at VWC and, in association with the Naro Cinema, will be shown again Wed., Oct. 22, at Norfolk’s Studio for the Healing Arts (1611-D Colley Ave.) at 7 p.m. Emmanuel will host the evening, which includes a post-screening discussion. Admission is $5.

The film is thoughtful, informative, non-judgmental, compassionate, and, frankly, hard to watch in its unflinching examination of the continuing suffering from the war, especially among Vietnamese children but also among American veterans haunted by acts they participated in.

Taken as a whole, it adds up to a moral indictment of warfare, though Emmanuel, who also narrates, avoids uttering a single anti-war syllable. The facts, combined with the testimony of people interviewed, speak for themselves.

Thus, we learn, the U.S. dropped eight million tons of bombs on Vietnam—more than all the bombs combined in World War II. We sprayed nineteen million gallons of herbicide on the countryside, spread twelve million tons of Agent Orange (containing the highly toxic chemical

dioxin), and unleashed 400,000 tons of napalm. Unexploded land mines and cluster bombs have killed 35,000 Vietnamese and wounded 65,000 since the war ended in 1975, while an estimated several hundred thousand tons of ordnance remain unaccounted for.

As the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. attests, 58,195 Americans were killed in the conflict. But, as is nowhere memorialized, more than two million Vietnamese died.

"We spend a lot of time preparing for war and waging war," says Emmanuel, but very little "for the consequences of war," including help for our own traumatized veterans.

Those consequences may include abnormally high incidents of cancer and birth defects, including Downs Syndrome and congenital heart disease among Vietnamese children, as a result of dioxin pollution from Agent Orange. The U.S. has never acknowledged such a link, and scientific evidence for it is only "suggestive," says Dr. Nguyen Viet Nhan, director of the Office for Genetic Counselling and Disabled Children in Hue Province in central Vietnam. But fierce fighting there during the 1968 Tet Offensive left high concentrations of dioxin pollution behind.

Emmanuel interviews Nhan extensively in the film, a meeting facilitated through Allen Sandler, Norfolk founder of the Mindfulness Community of Hampton Roads, one of several non-profit organizations supporting Nhan’s work, which, among other health services, performs corrective heart surgery for children.

Other charitable interventions are also active in Vietnam, including some initiated by veterans like Ken Herrmann, whose organization provides services to a Vietnamese leper colony, which Emmanuel visits.

As Sandler notes in the film, outside of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), Vietnam remains a deeply impoverished country, in no small part because of the war.

Yet oddly, perhaps, Emmanuel could find no resentment against Americans during his four visits there, beginning in 2006. The Vietnamese, he found, have moved on. But have we?

Not according to Buddhist teacher and Vietnamese native Thich Nhat Hanh, who Emmanuel interviewed during the monk’s first return home to Hue since his exile for pacifist activities during the war.

"If you don’t understand your own suffering," says Hanh, "you will continue to produce suffering for yourself and others. While you still follow the old pattern with another partner—like Iraq, like Iran—you have not learned anything from Vietnam."