Casualties of War

A filmmaker follows a family from Laos to Brooklyn over 23 years in this Academy Award-nominated doc.

by Cindy Fuchs

Courtesy of Cinema Guild DUPED: Filmmaker Ellen Kuras worked with co-director Thavisouk Phrasavath's family for 23 years for their film, Nerakhoon (The Betrayal).

[ philadelphia film première ]

The first images of Ellen Kuras' sublime Nerakhoon (The Betrayal) are at once lovely and weighty. Sunlight dances across a river's surface as a fisherman draws up his net, alive with shimmering fish. The next cut shows children atop water buffalo, their silhouettes shifting, under Thavisouk Phrasavath's narration. As a child in Laos, his grandparents passed on a story of the future: "The time will come," they said, "when the universe will break. It will break piece by piece, country by country, religion by religion. ... The world that we know now will change beyond recognition."

Thavi's own memories are poetic and harsh, tangled in the war he left behind but never escaped. The film illustrates this with photos of colonialists and natives, archival footage of soldiers, homes in ruins and landscapes decimated. He recalls, "Almost every morning on my way to school, I remember seeing the wounded soldiers crying in pain on the stretchers. ... Days and nights, planes and jets flew over the roof of my house on their way to targets." He pauses. "This was war explaining itself to me. I thought killing and dying was only a normal thing."

On its face, Thavi's story is like those of many other survivors of the U.S. war in Vietnam, which bled into Cambodia and Laos even as the U.S. denied it. His mother Orady recalls that her life as the wife of a soldier — with 10 children — was "full of struggle." After her husband spent years fighting with the Americans, helping them to bomb communist targets, he was, like other Laotians, abandoned by the U.S., which pulled out of the region in 1975. Arrested by the pro-communist Pathet Lao, he was designated a traitor and lost to his family and his wife.

Betrayal — actual and perceived — is pervasive in Nerakhoon. When Orady at last moves her children to Brooklyn, imagining the U.S. will welcome them, they settle into a two-room apartment they must share with a family of six Cambodians and "a Vietnamese guy," as well, who as Thavi observes, are "people who are not always friendly in history." The kids face poverty, violence and racism, and take various routes to rebellion and survival.

Thavi meets Kuras when he is a teen hanging out on street corners in 1985, his jeans skinny and his dragon tattoos visible. She begins to film him, and their collaboration takes shape over some 23 years. Having escaped the wars in Southeast Asia, Orady worries about her children on Flatbush Avenue. She frets that they have become aliens in America. "They ignore me, they refuse me," she says. "Every time they turn on the music, their eyes glaze over, they are lost in their own world, all of them."

For his part, Thavi tries to balance his sense of obligation and resentment. He believes his father is a hero who fought valiantly and wants to protect his siblings, to be "like my father." When they learn that their father is in fact alive, surviving years in a prison camp and since living in Florida with a new family, Thavi feels cheated — again. "I didn't create these children," he says, the angles of his face circled in cigarette smoke. "I took his place for so many years, now he has a life with another wife."

Delineating so many kinds of betrayal, brutal and intimate, the movie doesn't need to underline how Thavi's experience is like that of other war victims, in Iraq or Afghanistan — children surrounded by chaos and bloody violence, betrayed repeatedly, whether by accident or intention. "I run between what I remember and what is forgotten," Thavi says, "searching for the story of our people whose truth has not been told. We are travelers moving in and out of dream and nightmare. What happens to people without land, a place to call home?" It's a question Nerakhoon cannot answer. But asking it is one way to initiate a sense of recovery and responsibility.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

Nerakhoon (The Betrayal) | Tue., May 5, 7 p.m., $5-$10 (co-director Thavisouk Phrasavath will be in attendance), International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org.