"Three wars, a lost ship: 43 years later, I set out to uncover the riddle of myAmerasian/Vietnamese heritage."
Spanning three wars and a journey across three continents, Lost Pictures presents a distinctive biographical narrative of a mixed-race Vietnamese-American filmmaker coming to terms with her identity and a unique family history. The filmmaker, Ina Adele, embarks on a quest to connect with her Vietnamese roots through the search of missing photographs belonging to her Vietnamese family that were lost on a French cargo ship.
En route to Paris from Vietnam, the ship was trapped for eight years in the Suez Canal because of the Six Day Arab-Israeli War. Confronted by language barriers and doubts of her ability as a mixed-race filmmaker to make a film about Vietnamese people, Ina Adele perseveres in her travels across the U.S., France and Vietnam to present an untold story of war, loss, sacrifice and acceptance.
In American media, Vietnamese people are almost exclusively represented as one-dimensional "victims" (ex. boat people; napalm victims) or "enemies," (ex. Viet Cong Communists). There are few mainstream documentaries about the Vietnam War that represent the Vietnamese as complex human beings caught between different national ideologies and cultures. Lost Pictures presents this seldom-heard voice.
Throughout the film, Ina Adele explores the contradictory feelings her grandfather and Vietnamese relatives have towards Vietnam, France, and the United States.
View 10-minute exerpt of the Workin-Progress:
The film also explores aspects of the Vietnam War rarely told of the events leading up to the war, when Vietnam fought both the French and the Japanese during World War II and won. The historical content of this film is especially significant to American audiences as an unknown history.
The film's narrative devices take the form of 'collage' or 'montage' including: video interviews (with family members, shipping archivists, and the ship's captain and crew), observational (fly-on-the-wall) footage of Ina Adele's journey to France and Vietnam, home movies/family photos, historical archival footage, and stylized re-enacted super8 'memory' imagery.
Click here for Ina Adele's travelogue on her journey in Vietnam.
Contact information: lostpicts@gmail.com