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When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs' travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that's put together with the warmth of a quilt. WHICH WAY IS EAST starts as a road trip and flowers into a political discourse. It combines Vietnamese parables, history and memories of the people the sisters met, as well as their own childhood memories of the war on TV.
"To Americans for whom the Vietnam War ended in 1975, WHICH WAY IS EAST is a reminder that Vietnam is a country, not a war. The film has a combination of qualities: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history's scope, and a critical ability to discern what's missing from the textbooks and TV news." (Susan Gerhard, The Independent)
"Captures the Vietnam experience with comprehension and compassion, squeezing a vast and incredible country into an intriguing film." Portland Tonic Magazine
"What comes through is such a strong sense of the place you can almost smell it."
The Chicago Reader
"Subtly explores and cleverly challenges Vietnam's place in the American mind. The film's provocative reflections on war, memory and collective guilt and on the multiple ways in which both Americans and Vietnamese understand the dramatic intersection in their histories makes it an ideal discussion generator." Peter Zinoman, Department of History, University of California at Berkeley
Further Information:
SCREENINGS: Sundance Film Festival; Atlanta Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize; New York Film Expo, Best Documentary; Black Maria Film Fest Director's Citation; Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Cinematheque; Pacific Film Archive; San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival; Melbourne Film Fest; Sydney Film Fest; Whitney Museum of American Art The American Century Retrospective.
INSIDE COVER: Excerpt from The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam by Dana Sachs
| Catalog Number: MC-465 |
Type: Short |
Genre: Documentary, Political / Social |
| Copyright: 1994 |
Length: 33 minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 (All) |
| TV System: NTSC |
ISBN: |
UPC/EAN: 880198046598 |
| Label: Lynne Sachs Films |
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This is a Microcinema Exclusive title.
Wholesale Purchasing:
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Exhibition:
Microcinema is not authorized to represent this title for exhibition. Write us for this contact information.
Films In Compilation
Which Way is East - Notebooks from Vietnam directed by
Lynne
Sachs
USA,
Documentary,
1994,
Color,
Magnetic Stereo,
00:33:00
When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs' travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that's put together with the warmth of a quilt. WHICH WAY IS EAST starts as a road trip and flowers into a political discourse. It combines Vietnamese parables, history and memories of the people the sisters met, as well as their own childhood memories of the war on TV. "To Americans for whom the Vietnam War ended in 1975, WHICH WAY IS EAST is a reminder that Vietnam is a country, not a war. The film has a combination of qualities: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history's scope, and a critical ability to discern what's missing from the textbooks and TV news." (Susan Gerhard, The Independent)
"Captures the Vietnam experience with comprehension and compassion, squeezing a vast and incredible country into an intriguing film." Portland Tonic Magazine
"What comes through is such a strong sense of the place you can almost smell it."
The Chicago Reader
"Subtly explores and cleverly challenges Vietnam's place in the American mind. The film's provocative reflections on war, memory and collective guilt and on the multiple ways in which both Americans and Vietnamese understand the dramatic intersection in their histories makes it an ideal discussion generator." Peter Zinoman, Department of History, University of California at Berkeley
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 |
2007-05-22
By P. Hall
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs teamed with her sister Dana, a journalist living in Vietnam, to create this short but memorable documentary based on their personal journey from Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon) to the capital in Hanoi. The Sachs sisters clearly have a mission, seeking out reminders of the damage created from the Vietnam War, and finding evidence of that increasingly-distant era in bomb craters and preserved tunnels where entire villages lived during wartime. But the filmmakers are not prepared for the reactions of the Vietnamese: everywhere they travel, the Sachs discover that the people are forward-thinking and harbor no animosity towards the American women behind the camera. The lessons here are interesting: Americans have frozen Vietnam into a disturbing moment in time from three decades ago while today’s Vietnam is living in the present and planning for the future—unlike Americans, the Vietnamese are not obsessed with the past and, thus, are not held prisoner to it. An intelligent, lyrical documentary that raises thought-provoking questions while reminding viewers that Vietnam is an actual place not just a historical conflict, this is highly recommended. |
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Investigation of a Flame by Lynne Sachs
MC-564, 2001
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On May 17, 1968, three priests, a nurse, an artist and four others walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm. INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME is an intimate... more >
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Lynne Sachs: 10 Short Films and Videos, Vol. 3
MC-724, 2007
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10 Films:
“XY Chromosome Project” 12 min. 2007
“The Small Ones”, 3 min. video 2006
“Noa, Noa”, 8 min. 16mm, 2006
“Atalanta 32 Years Later” 5 min. video, 2006
“Tornado”, 4 min. video 2002
“Photograph of Wind” 4 min. 16mm, silent,... more >
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Tales of Urban Fascination
MC-1159, 2010
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Urban wanderings inspire these six experimental films ' from a collage of movie trailers found outside a Brooklyn theater, to an evocation of an Uruguayan poet's life as a bookkeeper, to a compendium of vox populi interviews gleaned from city... more >
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The Last Happy Day
MC-1237, 2011
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The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in... more >
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Wind in Our Hair
MC-1238, 2010
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Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, “Wind in Our Hair” is an experimental narrative directed by New York filmmaker Lynne Sachs about four girls discovering themselves... more >
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No screenings found
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