Pawns in the game

This documentary is complicated and tricky to follow and leaves many questions unanswered, but it's poetic and moving and its subject is important. Closely collaborating with the eldest son of an exiled Laotian family, Ellen Kuras has forged a work that's as deeply personal as it is wide-ranging in its political and historical implications.

George Packer has written about how Iraqis who worked for the Americans have been left hanging. This is exactly what happened over three decades earlier to members of the Laotian military who worked for the Americans during the "secret" (or more accurately denied) bombing of Laos during the Vietnam war--a campaign justified by the fact that the North Vietnamese conduit, the Ho Chi Mihn Trail, ran through Laos. Filling in the historical background, The Betrayal shows JFK talking about the need for Laos's "neutrality" (and its cooperation against the communists) and Nixon denying the bombing, the "Secret War." Intertitles give staggering statistics of how many bombs were dropped on Laos over a nine-year period by US planes--more than in World Wars I and II combined. There is no information about how many Laotians were killed. The US was also supporting the Royal Laotian Army "neutralist" forces against the communist Pathet Lao, as well as training Laotians to fight in US operations. When America lost the war in Vietnam and pulled out, it also abruptly cut off Laos and its Laotian collaborators.

The US's sudden abandonment of its Lao allies profoundly altered the life of a Laotian pre-teen named Thavisouk ("Thavi") Phrasavath. A lean, toothy guy, Thavi appears at many stages of life in Kuras' film, in stills from those early days and later with hair sometimes down to his waist or his shoulders, in a crew-cut, or short and slicked back--changes reflecting a life full of turbulent shifts.

Thavi was the director's long-time collaborator on the film and is its narrator and its emblematic central figure. Shot in often intimate circumstances over a 23-year period, The Betrayal is the saga of a family torn apart first by war itself, then by repercussions of the father's collaboration with the US, and finally by painful and difficult exile in America. Its Laotian title, Nerakhoon, actually means "the betrayed ones." That is how Thavi came to think of his family members and those like them.

Thavi grew up in Laos knowing only bombings, destruction, and death. His father was one of those very same Laotian officers who, as he himself tells the camera, collaborated in the "Secret War," actually "calling in" American planes that bombed his country "to save it." Nonetheless he was Thavi's and his siblings' hero. When the Americans abandoned Laos, the Pathet Lao took over. It was a happy moment, with celebration and singing everywhere. Then the Pathet suddenly came and took Thavi's father away for a reeducation "seminar"--imprisonment with hard labor as an enemy of the state. From then on his family, his mother and nine children, had no friends any more and lived in fear. Thavi, the eldest son, fled the country on his own in 1977 at the age of 12 by swimming the Mekong River. Through Thavi's words and shimmering images of the water, the film evokes that lonely swim, when he would have been happy to die if it came to that, to be "gone and gone."

Instead he woke up the next morning in Thailand, alive. He remained a street boy in Bangkock for two years, unti the rest of his family managed to escape Laos too and they all reunited at a refugee camp. Well, not all: two elder sisters were not at home when the facilitator came to help the family flee across the river in a leaky boat, and their mother was forced to leave without them.

The Betrayal blends period footage with impressionistic images of flight through woods backed up by the surging music of Howard Shore, and there are shots of Thavi talking. There is no footage of the family before it fled, but Kuras compensates with stills and shots of other people doing things Thavi describes. Filming them over the last 23 years, she captured some key moments of the family's life in exile.

The big shock is what happens to the family when the mother chooses for them to be sent to the US rather than France or Canada. They are dumped unceremoniously in a very dangerous drug- and gang-ridden part of Brooklyn in 1981. Without a father, in this ugly, hostile environment, the various siblings revolted, the girls hanging out with "bad" boys, the brothers joining gangs. There is a back-and-forth in the film between Thavi's mother speaking in the eighties in anger and despair about the bad pass the family came to at that time (Kuris discovered them in 1984, when Thavi was 19) and today, more serenely recalling three decades of struggle with her now 40-something son.

After fifteen years of silence and separation, the father found them and came from Florida to Brooklyn visit them. Like the takeover of the Pathet Lao and their shipment to America, this longed-for reunion with their "hero" was another moment of hope and happiness quickly followed by despair, when he revealed after a week of euphoric reunion that he had another wife and children in Florida and was returning to them. We see Thavi calling his father later and quietly begging him to come and take things in hand, to no avail. Later, Thavi attends the funeral of one of his step-brothers in Florida--a member of and victim of the same "red" gang that recruited Thavi's brothers in New York.

Thavi has referred to the analogy with Iraq in an interview at the Witness documentary film festival. There are over two million Iraqi refugees from the US invasion and occupation, and only a tiny handful have been accepted into the US. I think this larger implication is what Kuras and Phrasavath seek to communicate with the film's mix of poetry and devastation: that America has made this "mistake" (Thavi's gentle word) of destroying a country and abandoning its collaborators over and over and the time has come for that to stop.

What has happened to the family today? The film doesn't give details, except that they don't live in Brooklyn any more (too gentrified and expensive?). The mother lives in New Jersey with a daughter. Thavi lives in New York with a wife and small child. He made a trip back to Laos and we see him reunited with the two lost older sisters, a grandmother who died at 104, and other family members. And to look at the other siblings, they've settled down and stabilized, but we don't know how they managed that, or any of the specifics about them, or what Thavi does now--but clearly he's a filmmaker, and a spokesman on the issues brought up in The Betrayal. In fact, he's edited two other films related to immigration and border-crossing issues, and he edited as well as narrated and shot parts of this one. Kuras is a well-known DP who's worked for Michel Gondry and Spike Lee and on other directors' notable films. This is her (collaborative) directorial debut. Despite its lacunae and a narrative structure that's sometimes too dreamily meditative or too erratic, this is still a rich and indispensable document.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.