Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam

Filmmaker Lynne Sachs teamed with her sister Dana, a journalist living in Vietnam, to create this short but memorable documentary based on their personal journey from Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon) to the capital in Hanoi. The Sachs sisters clearly have a mission, seeking out reminders of the damage created from the Vietnam War, and finding evidence of that increasingly-distant era in bomb craters and preserved tunnels where entire villages lived during wartime. But the filmmakers are not prepared for the reactions of the Vietnamese: everywhere they travel, the Sachs discover that the people are forward-thinking and harbor no animosity towards the American women behind the camera. The lessons here are interesting: Americans have frozen Vietnam into a disturbing moment in time from three decades ago while today's Vietnam is living in the present and planning for the future—unlike Americans, the Vietnamese are not obsessed with the past and, thus, are not held prisoner to it. An intelligent, lyrical documentary that raises thought-provoking questions while reminding viewers that Vietnam is an actual place not just a historical conflict, this is highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)