"Three wars, a lost ship: 43 years later, I set out to uncover the riddle of myAmerasian/Vietnamese heritage."
"Hapa" (mixed-race) filmmaker Adele Ray, daughter of a Vietnamese teacher and an American serviceman who met during the Vietnam War, searches for a chest of family photographs from Saigon that were lost on a trapped ship in the Suez Canal during the Arab-Israeli War in 1967. Her journey to find the photographs, takes her to France & Vietnam where she uncovers her family's Vietnam War & World War II history, and her own belonging in a Vietnamese family who suffered prejudice while she passed for white.
Synopsis
Filmmaker, Ina Adele Ray, aka “Adele”, was born to a Vietnamese mother and an American father, one year after the Vietnam War in 1976. Adele’s father met her mother when she was teaching Vietnamese to American servicemen in El Paso, Texas in 1969, shortly before he left for his tour in Vietnam. Her parents tell their story of how they met in her first short film, El Paso, Vietnam (2002) that has screened nationally and abroad.
Lost Pictures is an expansion of El Paso, Vietnam, that brings Adele from behind the camera to the forefront as a participant in the telling of her unique mixed-race family history. The film is a poetic, personal essay that weaves 3 narratives together: (1) Adele’s search, as a ‘hapa’ (a mixed-race Asian), for a sense of belonging and acceptance by her Vietnamese family, (2) her family’s stories of displacement in France and the US along with the hardships and losses they endured in Vietnam, and (3) the quest to find the only remaining photos her grandparents had of the family from Vietnam that were on a trapped cargo ship in the Suez Canal during the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli War.
Lost Pictures reveals to the audience the internal conflicts of a bi-racial identity while traveling back in time, to experience a perspective of everyday people in extraordinary circumstances. It presents a refreshing historical view of the Vietnam War through the personal accounts of transnational Vietnamese, pre-1975. The film brings into question the meaning of authenticity of race and national identity. It explores issues of displacement and assimilation. Lost Pictures is for audiences of first, second, and third generations of immigrant, non-immigrant, and mixed-race families who long to connect with one another in search of understanding their own unique family identity, values, traditions, and heritage.
View 10-minute exerpt of the Workin-Progress:
Film Status: Lost Pictures is currently in post production and is seeking finishing funds. Downtown Community Television is the film's fiscal sponsor. To learn how to make a charitable tax-deductable donation, email: lostpicts@gmail.com
Filmmaker's Bio: Ina Adele Ray is a filmmaker and professional video editor who lives and works bi-coastally in the SF Bay Area and New York City. She has 10 years of multimedia, video, and film production experience, working a wide range of media from tv spots and promos to short documentaries for educational and non-profit organizations (Women's Refugee Commission, UNICEF, and The Computer History Museum). She has also served as a Part-time Assistant Professor, teaching film and media courses at the New School University and has previously taught at NYU and Parsons School of Design. Her film, El Paso Vietnam received awards and screened at various venues locally, nationally, and abroad. Ms. Ray also produced, Parallel Adele, with director, Adele Free Pham, about bi-racial Asian-American identity, which has
made the 2008-09 film festival circuit. Most recently, she screened a compilation of her and Adele Free Pham's work along with the work of fellow bi-racial Vietnamese American filmmaker, Kim Spurlock (2010 Student Academy Award recipient) in a screening called 3 Women at Reel Works in Gowanus, Brooklyn.