Used in the UCB Media Resources Web site with permission. From Hollywood to Hanoi. It opens like an ominous fairy tale, with cartoonlike, redneck bad guys standing on a dock, one of them fingering a cigar. A young Southeast Asian woman pulls a gun on them.
American identity is on.
Free As I Want 2B. Using what must be some of her most embarrassing film clips, Tiana acknowledges and plays off of her previous 'identities' right off the bat. Their difficulty yet eagerness in answering her parallels the filmmaker's own complex approach to identity throughout the course of the film. But it is her later decision to return to Vietnam that defines the film. There, amid emotional meetings with relatives and visiting places she excitedly remembers or has only heard about, the camera bears witness to Tiana's reunion with a proudly Vietnamese Vietnam, the oasis of her quest to find what it can mean to be Vietnamese. Billed as the first American film about Vietnam actually shot in that country, the footage is, indeed, quite remarkable.