This year Living in Nyon is delighted to have two reviewers at Visions du Réel. Trish Thalman (who reviewed films for this site last year) and newcomer Kathy Morf. They will both be giving their reviews of the films that they have seen at the festival. Many of these reviews will be of films that will be shown again so keep checking the site on a daily basis to see what’s coming up.
The first review from Kathy is of “Born under Z” which will be shown tonight 8th April at 20:00 at the Capitole 2 Cinema. This film is a world premiere here in Nyon.
Kathy says “this is a deeply moving film and door to the past of what really happened to one of the 5,000 children that was separated from his Vietnamese mother and sent to France in 1954 and definitely worth seeing”.
Children sent to France to strengthen the Motherland
A ship filled 5,000 children leaves the Saigon harbour (actual Ho Chi Minh City). It is 1954 after the fall of Diên Biên Phu, Vietnam. The French are sending home carefully selected, healthy children to France. They are needed to strengthen the motherland. These half-cast Indochinese children’s French blood overpowers the Vietnamese blood and gives them the right become a French citizen.
Robert Vaesa is one of the children sent to France at the age of ten. He lived with Vietnamese mother and knew his French father for two years before he was injured and sent back to France. Robert is sent to a strict Catholic boarding school with other half-caste children like himself. They are taught in French and little by little loose their Vietnamese identity to be replaced with a French one. Robert recalls having received everything a child could need: food, clothes and an education. The only thing that was missing was a family.
Waiting in vain by the school gate for his mother
Robert’s mother, Mrs. Khiem worked for the French. When Robert is first sent to boarding school she comes to visit him every Sunday. He waits for her by the gate every week. As the months go by she comes less and then no more. He still waits for her every Sunday until he is forced to realize that she will not come again and that he is now alone. He is deeply hurt and feels abandoned.
Today Robert now lives in France with his wife and ttwo children. He slowly begins to reveal the separation with his mother that he has, until now, buried deep down. He never knew if he even had any relatives. He never saw his father again and grew up in an orphanage in France. His French cousins tried to locate him for years, having heard of him through their uncle, Roberts father. They searched under the name Vaeza (with a z) but couldn’t find anyone. His name had been intentionally changed to Vaesa (with an s) to blur out any hope of ever finding a family member. When the older cousin retires she redoubles her search efforts and finally locates Robert. She leaves him a message asking if he could be the long lost cousin they have been looking for. Robert makes the trip to meet the family he never knew existed. The camera follows a gentle but shy man that hesitantly walks towards these strangers who warmly welcome him.
Cousin Sylvia explains that when she was sick her mother gave her a box of photos to look at as a girl. She discovers Roberts picture and asks her mother who the Vietnamese boy is. When she finds that he has been ripped away from his mother and sent to France she feels a great injustice. As a teenager she begins her search to find him and does not give up until 50 years later. Robert listens carefully to his newfound family and begins to remember the past he tried to forget so long ago. He never told his children about his previous life.
A door to the past has been opened
A party is organized with some of the Indochinese orphaned children. He hasn’t seen them in over 40 years. They exchange stories of their childhood and how they remember playing together. A door to the past has been opened. Robert travels to Paris, visits the overseas archives and finds his file. He stares at a picture of himself as a young boy and chuckles. He cannot understand why he was abandoned if he was not bad looking and had been well behaved. What had he done wrong? He discovers a letter written by his mother to the school asking for his news. He looks hurt that this information never reached him while he waited in vain by the school gates week after week for his mother to visit.
He walks along the streets of Paris searching for links to the Indochinese colonial past in sculptures, buildings and street names. He tries to understand what happened 50 years ago and begins reading books about the children of the colonial past. He is shocked to learn that the departure of the ship that he was on was well planned in advance. France was doing them a favour by saving them and bringing them “home”.
He meets veteran soldiers that served in the French army at the time. They reveal to him how they were first struck by the appalling poverty and how the army was cruel and unjust with the locals. Pretty Vietnamese women were forced into prostitution. It was a custom for many of the soldiers to marry a local woman, even if just for a month.
He feels foreign in his own country
Half a century after his departure, Robert is ready to travel to Vietnam with his wife and children. As he steps out of the taxi in the busy, noisy and colourful streets of Ho Chi Minh he does not recognize anything. He searches the streets he once knew for sings of his early childhood. An elderly Vietnamese man helps him and asks the locals if they remember any of the places Roberts draws on paper out of his memory. He looks at the boarding school, Catholic Church, French prison, streets and buildings he once knew and does not recollect anything. He feels foreign in his own country as if he does not belong here or really in France. His biggest wish is to find his mother: to hold her and to tell her that he is not angry with her anymore and that he forgives her for what happened which was out of their control.
Film directed by Frédérique Pollet Royer – France/ Belgium 75 minutes length
Kathy Morf works as a graphic designer in Geneva. She loves to travel and write about her adventures on her blog (click on link ) kathyand theworld.
She grew up in Quebec, Canada and moved to Switzerland at seventeen. Her love for writing encouraged her join the Geneva Writers’ Group and a small critique group that meets once a month. She is currently taking an online journalism course and will travel to London this spring for a travel writing class.