Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), cinematographer Ellen Kuras‘ documentary directorial debut, was recently named to the Academy’s short list of potential Best Documentary nominees, and it’s certainly deserving. A film over wo decades in the making, its back-story is fairly remarkable. Kuras met her subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, while looking for a Laotian translator for a film she planned to direct about a family from Laos then living in Rochester, NY, but then became so interested in her potential translator’s own refugee story that she turned the camera on him instead.
Kuras went on to essentially became a master at her day job accidentally; as she told indieWIRE when the film debuted at Sundance, she started her career as an “an associate producer, an assistant cameraperson on docs, and as an electrician on dramatic films (so that I could learn how to light),” and then as production on Nerakhoon continued on, she found herself “needing to take on other projects in order to pay for it.” Those jobs included shooting commercials directed by people like Spike Lee, and eventually films like I Shot Andy Warhol, Blow, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And yet The Betrayal remained a resolutely independent, low-to-the-ground personal project. Phrasavath, called “Thavi” on screen, is billed as co-director and editor, and often functioned as Kuras’ only other crew member, acting as “translator, cohort and production assistant.” Together he and Kuras combine freshly-shot 16mm material with archival footage, home video, and what look like ancient home movies into a collage of overlapping images. It’s an approach that fits the film perfectly: this world-class camerawoman has made a handmade document of a global-political story concentrated down into a single, extraordinarily intimate portrait, in which the “bigger” issues are mirrored but ultimately dwarfed by domestic tragedy.
When Thavi was a child growing up in a huge family in Laos, his father was recruited to work intelligence within that country’s secret, CIA-financed and trained military — a military which dropped US bombs (more bombs in a single year than in World Wars I and II combined) on its own country, a military whose men were left hanging when the US abruptly exited Laos and allowed the country to be taken over by the Communist Pathet Lao. When Thavi’s father was arrested as an enemy of the state in 1975 and taken to a “re-education” camp, the family left behind were surveiled in their own home, and eldest son Thavi was routinely taken in for questioning. “We weren’t one of them anymore,” Thavi’s mom remembers. At age 12, Thavi’s grandmother read his fortune, and determined that he must leave Laos immediately. So the preteen swam across the Mekong River to Thailand, where he lived as a “street kid” for two years until his family–save for two older sisters who wouldn’t fit in the boat, and their father, who was assumed to have been executed–joined him. Soon what was left of the Phrasavath family made their way, with the help of a refugee agency, to Brooklyn.
As the de facto head of the household once the family settled in a cramped tenement next to a crack house in Flatbush (and the family’s most fluent English-speaker), Thavi takes on much of the storytelling duty for the second half of the film, describing the family’s culture shock and initial confusion over how to deal with basic life needs, both of which converged and were embodied by Thavi’s apparently frequent trips to a Prospect Park pond to fish for dinner. But it’s his mother Orady whose testimony provides the film’s emotional and spiritual center. Thavi’s father and the other Laotian soldiers, she tells us, “were really willing to die for the Americans, but they [the US] just left in the middle of the war.” And so Orady really believed it when, back in Laos, she told Thavi that the “US government will take care of us in America” in exchange for what she they perceived as the Phrasavath’s employer/employee relationship with the US. Having also heard that the United States was a magical land where “water flows in every house, light shines in every room,” where “if you make it this far, you are one step away from heaven,” the decision to come here from their war-decimated homeland was a no brainer.
But years later, she concludes, “life in America is hell on Earth.” The Phrasavath family essentially hopped from one stifling climate of fear to another. At least back in Laos, they knew the language, knew the social customs, knew the rules. In Brooklyn, they lived in abject poverty, and paralyzed by fear of the various Asian gangs. As her children struggle to accept and then get through the day-to-day (one of Thavi’s sisters survives a sexual assault at the hands of gang members; another family member isn’t as lucky), Orady never quite gets over the culture shock, and desperately laments the way the transport of her family has divided them generationaly. “The time will come when the universe will shake. The children will escape, blowing like the wind. The wisdom and value of human life will be lost,” she reads from an ancient Lao prophecy, over footage of the modern, hooligan teenagers who rule the Brooklyn streets. Not only were they promised heaven and put through hell, but for this family, what they perceive as the betrayal of the US government first after the war and then after their own immigration is tantamount to bringing upon a fall of civilization 5000 years in the making.
And then it gets personal. One day Thavi picks up the phone to learn that his father is, in fact, alive. The long-gone patriarch rejoins the family in Brooklyn, and at first all is good. He even gives an interview for the film, talking-head style, in which he rails against the US government for betraying him and his fellow soldiers. And then he tells Orady, Thavi and the sisters that he has to leave, for reasons that are probably left unspoiled, but which instill in his waiting the family the anger, resentment, and loss he himself felt over being abandoned by the US. This familial betrayal takes over the political betrayal, and leaves the deeper scar. 20 years of hopes and wishes and struggles and grudges, are condensed down into a single, discreet, but permanently devastating disappointment.
Rather than offering answers for the Phrasavath family’s predicaments or suggesting an outlets for their sadness or rage, Kuras just keeps showing up, and allows the story to unfold at the speed of memory. Like a painting with blurred edges, there is no hard start or finish to a story like The Betrayal — the past continues to reverberate, the present contiues to challenge, pain never goes away.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth