Tanto material y la gran oportunidad que tuvieron para hacer algo grandioso con esta "red-neck" y su biológica madre de Vietnam pero no fueron capaces. Que lastima porque la historia daba para hacer algo supremo y era solo cuestión de armarlo bien pero se les quedo en una estupidez donde salen como mal los vietnamitas a la final. Por cultura general pero nada mas.

Tanto material y la gran oportunidad que tuvieron para hacer algo grandioso con esta "red-neck" y su biológica madre de Vietnam pero no fueron capaces. Que lastima porque la historia daba para hacer algo supremo y era solo cuestión de armarlo bien pero se les quedo en una estupidez donde salen como mal los vietnamitas a la final. Por cultura general pero nada mas.

An Amer-Asian woman travels to Vietnam to meet her long-lost mother. Aside from a few forays into a discussion of cultural and racial differences -- the Vietnamese family's request for money and the Tennessee family's racism -- there is no discernible difference between this documentary and an episode of Maury Povich. It has all the melodrama of daytime talk with very little of the thematic sophistication one might expect from film, especially a film that won at Sundance. Also, I found all the characters unlikable. Heidi lacked any characteristic aside from a plastic smile, and the family was all jubilation. And when the Vietnamese family "turned on" Heidi, I failed to sympathize with either party. Overall, Maury is the same but shorter, so watch it instead; just make sure you don't get a paternity episode instead of a reunion episode.

A true journey into the lives and perspectives of two different points of view. This is the perfect case studies of how upbringing, not blood, is what makes us who we are.

You think this documentary might be taking you some place predictable, and it ends up being so much more...disturbing. And complicated. A fantastic PBS-style shitshow. 4/5.

Provocative movie. Did the filmmakers send Heidi into the situation in order to exploit her ignorance? I think it's more Heidi's fault. If she did so much research into finding her mother, she should have done just as much research into discovering her culture. It's just a tragic story all around.

I loathe this documentary. If it were possible to put the film on trial then in pillory so I can berate it in the middle of townsquare I would, I really would. I don't object to the story or even to the tiresome central character. My real objection is to the filmmakers whose investment in cheap thrills outweighs any compassion they might have had for their subjects in the first place. Mai Thi Hiep & her family are just third-worlders after all, no need to be too concerned about objectifying them for this reality-온라인카지노추천 pornfest. When I'm less angry I'll attempt to explain myself again. In the meantime, I'll just say that the exact same story could have been handled very differently. How in the world did this film get an Academy Award nomination and the prestigious Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary? Perhaps it is I who is naive...

Watched this in a women's history class The lady is so freakin' selfish! And I feel SO bad for the mother though, she didn't do anything more than just love and try to protect her child.

Controversial, enlightening, and emotionally unsettling. This is what you can expect to experience and more, when you watch this extremely well-made documentary. The reunion between mother and daughter after more than 20 years of separation begins as tearfully happy and eventually becomes tearfully unsettling. The film describes how Operation Babylift was created and then shows the consequences of that socio-political program on the lives of a Vietnamese child and her estranged mother 20-plus years later. The child is adopted by a single American mother whom we soon discover emotionally abused the little girl and eventually disowned her. The Vietnamese mother has lived all those years with virtually no knowledge of her daughter. This is the backdrop for the highly charged emotional encounter that plays out in front of the viewer's eyes. It's a raw, emotional roller coaster ride for the family and viewers. In the film, Heidi Bub (central figure) comes across as a thoroughly unlikable, self-absorbed, selfish woman, who is little interested in the culture from which she sprang. It is ironic that this Amerasian woman should have returned to the home of her birth and revealed herself to be nothing more than the proverbial "ugly American." Although Heidi herself is a mother, she seemed to have little understanding of the sacrifice her biological mother made over twenty years ago. Although she is a college graduate, Heidi also seemed to have little understanding of the dynamics that transpired between herself and her biological family, which is certainly an indictment of the education that she has received. She left Vietnam knowing as little about love, as when she first set foot back in that country. Albeit, her Vietnamese family was pushy and a little grasping beyond normal cultural norms, they should simply move on and put Heidi on the back burner of their memories, as she has of them. I highly recommend this film to those who are willing to grapple with the strong emotions that surround the reunion of an adopted child with the birth parent. The emotions and expectations of all involved are intense. When language and cultural differences are added to such reunions, the emotional stakes become even more highly charged. These are the compelling issues that you can expect to witness and not soon forget when you watch Daughter From Danang. Unquestionably this is a must see documentary.

i could not deal. the scene at the very end - the mother trying to eat without crying - broke me. wish the documentarians could have chosen a better person to follow than this particular "daughter".

I disliked the daughter so much it was hard to relate to. Little southern pork pone.

...all I can say is, I did NOT see that coming.

I am extremely sensitive on the subject of adoption. For those of you who don't know, I gave up my daughter for adoption the day after she was born. I still see her sometimes, but not very often, especially considering that she lives about 150 miles, tops, away. However, because of that, I will watch just about any damn thing with adoption in it. It was only lack of money that kept me from seeing [i]Juno[/i], for example, and I'll be putting it on my library list even though it's out of order because I need to see it in order to feel connected with my own experience. Largely, I need to feel that society is acknowledging the value of what I've done. But what I did was nothing compared to what Mai Thi Kim did. Her daughter was seven during the last days of South Vietnam as a separate country. Her daughter, Hiep, was half American. (The US is notorious for not having a system to handle the children of their servicemen in time of war.) Kim really, really believed that her daughter would be rounded up and burned to death; whether that actually happened to any half American child after the fall of Saigon, I cannot say. But, were I a parent and I thought there was even a chance, I may well have made the same decision, which was to give her daughter into the hands of an American adoption agency. Who the child's father was didn't matter; indeed, we still don't know. The child, now known as Heidi, has no interest in finding him. However, she did go to Vietnam to see her mother and her mother's family. The problem is that Heidi is not the Hiep who left Vietnam all those years ago. She has been thoroughly Americanized. She cannot adjust to the belief on the part of her Vietnamese half-siblings that she should help pay for her mother's expenses. (I'll note that, given the exchange rate, she almost certainly wouldn't have to pay [i]much[/i]!) She hasn't seen her mother in 22 years. She's become a Southerner; her adopted family made sure of that when she was very young indeed. She never met her half-siblings before her trip to Vietnam. She hadn't seen her mother in more than two thirds of her life. She wanted it all to be a happy experience, but she wasn't prepared for the cultural differences. She wasn't prepared for how open her half-siblings were about the money; Americans don't talk about it that freely for the most part. At least in my family, we let it simmer in bitterness instead. What I noticed and I don't think Heidi does is the casual racism of her adoptive family. Her original heritage is ignored. They seem proud that they made her into a "proper Southerner" who doesn't seem to know much of anything about Vietnam. When she is in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City now, isn't it?), she feels nothing about the end of the war, despite the fact that it shaped her life possibly more than any single event has or could. "It's just a parade," she says. Now, I'm not saying she should've been weeping over the whole thing, but surely, she should feel [i]something[/i]. The thing that affects her most seems to be that her Vietnamese family is not all that she expected of it, as if family ever is. After all, Heidi is not Hiep and hasn't been in years--which is another thing that her adoptive mother never seems to have considered important. This is heartbreaking, really. Heidi's return home left her more isolated from her birth family than she had been before she had ever known them. She no longer has any real interest in her father, even if she did before. She cares more for her adoptive grandmother, her adoptive family--despite the fact that her adoptive mother was abusive and has, essentially, disowned her. Heidi has lost her past. She still has her husband, children, and most of her adoptive relatives, but those last lost years with her birth mother no longer exist for her.

Moving but ultimately sad PBS documentary about a now grown-up mixed race (American-Vietnamese) woman who returns to Vietnam to meet the mother who gave her up during 'Operation Babylift' in the mid 1970's. The obvious cultural differences rage havoc as Heidi tries to bridge the gulf with her Vietnamese family and search for some sort of closure.

After coming across the film on PBS, I have to say it is a film that is so good that it seems to go by unnoticed by countless people. In short, it is a rare documentary the captures an honest story of family reunions and a search for closure in past wounds, only to find loss in moving on. I look forward to someone to finding someone who has seen this and found it meaningful and worthy of the time.

I went to see this last night. I think Jay-Z is just alright, and I wasn't really interested in seeing this, but I was on a date and the movie we wanted to see was sold out. Dude that I was out with loved it, but I found it really boring and I almost fell asleep. This movie seems to be copying off of Tupac Resurrection, except 2Pac's movie was like fifty times better to me. If you are not a die hard Jay-Z fan then save your money...wait for it to come out on HBO or something. There were some funny parts but all together they were like 5 minutes out of the whole movie and they are just really goofy, like people dancing funny and making weird faces. I am NOT feeling this movie...I give it a 2 out of 10 :rotten: :rotten: Jay-Z is overrated