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| Season Ma and Guo Jun-yi in Boat People |
Controversy still lingers around Ann Hui's Boat People, as it does around any work that attempts to tell the story of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The initial controversy arose because Hui made it in the opening phases of the transfer of the territory of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China, with the financial backing of that country and in a location, the island of Hainan, that belonged to China. It was the first Hong Kong film made in the People's Republic, and those holding out for Hong Kong's independence were upset by the collaboration. Today, the controversy centers on how accurate the portrayal of Vietnam and its government in the years immediately after the war really is. Boat People depicts a land of fear and repression, and its heroes are those who resist and try to escape from it. Critics of the film call it distorted and melodramatic. It centers on a Japanese photographer, Shiomi Akutagawa (George Lam), who witnessed the fall of South Vietnam and has returned three years later to document how the country has changed. He has the occasionally grudging and suspicious support of the new government, which of course wants a favorable portrait of the country. But as he travels about, he begins to suspect that he's not being allowed to see the whole truth. Befriending a small family, and particularly a 14-year-old girl, Cam Nuong (Season Ma), and her younger brothers Nhac (Wu Shu-Jun) and Lam (Guo Jun-yi), he starts to find the darker side of the new Vietnam. He also meets Nguyen (Mengshi Qi), who is unhappy with the course the country has taken, and his mistress (Cora Miao), who trades in the black market and helps people escape Vietnam. Boat People is an often compelling and brutal film that succeeds as drama despite (or perhaps because of) its political biases.
