An oral history project that focuses on stories from a wide range of Dorchester community members from teenagers to elders who left Vietnam in the 1970s has been turned into a 90-minute documentary that producers hope to screen publicly this summer.
The production also includes footage from events that took place last year as part of the Dorchester-based 1975 project.
‘Tre Già, Măng Mọc: Generations of Vietnamese Diaspora in Boston’ is directed by Lợi Huỳnh, with assistance from Jordan Waterworth, and executive production by Linh-Phương Vũ and Annie Lê, leader of Boston Little Saigon Cultural District.
Last month, the group released a trailer for the project that generated a buzz of great anticipation for the full documentary’s premiere this summer.
“The project started with Lợi and I last year,” said Vũ. “Through conversations, we had this idea to do a documentary on the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon last year. As the interviews went on and stories came out, it ended up being the piece that ties the past, present, and future of the community together…This is the first of its kind for the Vietnamese community in Boston. It’s never been documented in this way.”
Huỳnh, who lives in Randolph but grew up in Dorchester in the 1990s, said he has long hoped to showcase the Vietnamese experience here.
“It’s been incredibly rewarding to work on this, and it means a lot to have been trusted to do it. I was thinking how it was going to mean a lot to a lot of people, but to see it start to come to life now is pretty cool. A lot of this came down to trust. The community really trusts Linh. She and Annie Lêset it in motion.
He added: “Without that trust being built over so many years, I’m not sure people would have been so open and candid. Some of the sessions went more than two hours. Once people started trusting and got comfortable, they dug in and shared their life’s journey with us.”
Linh-Phương Vũ, co-executive producer.
Vũ noted that “elders want to share their story for the next generation and the younger generation wants to hear those stories, so what we wanted to do was make sure it was easy to digest, and language wasn’t a barrier…The fact we are part of this community helped. We are children of these refugees. Our parents go to these markets…They can trust us to share their stories for the next generation.”
Some of the stories involve the difficult realities of surviving the atrocities of war, overcoming the harrowing experiences of being relocated in the refugee process, and facing discrimination in Boston upon arrival.
While those things aren’t ignored and are part of the “arc of their story,” they also aren’t the central focus of the documentary.
“We wanted to acknowledge the war’s existence but keep it as a background character,” said Huỳnh. “Yes, the conflict was difficult, but in the context of the movie, we understand it as the setup because it’s the way the diaspora really began. We start with the fall of Saigon and then move fully into the diaspora.”
Added Vũ:. “Without their struggles taking place the community might not have developed the way it did.”
A key dynamic in the telling is relationships between the younger and older community members, and language as a way of keeping the culture and history alive.
“It was said often that if the Vietnamese language survives, the Vietnamese people survive,” said Waterworth. “Language and culture are so tied together…The younger generation is trying to learn Vietnamese and incorporate Vietnamese culture into their lives to be able to pass it on to the next generation. They seem to be ready and up to the challenge of carrying the torch.”
For his part, Huỳnh said that “there is this existing relationship where these young people want to communicate with their grandparents about this, but there are these barriers. We explore that. That to me was a very positive thing in the film.”
More than 130,000 Vietnamese refugees were evacuated in the war’s final weeks, and hundreds of thousands more arrived later through the US Refugee Act of 1980 and subsequent humanitarian programs. Dorchester was one of the key locations where many settled.
Vũ said they are working on a date – and a venue with a capacity of up to 700 – for the premiere this summer.
