THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY (2004)

Cast

Plot

One of the consequences of America's involvement in the Vietnam war was the children of the GI's by their Vietnamese wives and lovers. For years those women who were involved with Americans were social outcasts, treated as collaborators while their children, even when living with grandparents, endured taunts and abuse. This is the story of one such love child, Binh, forced from his village at 17, heads to Saigon to find his mother, then trying to escape to America with his much younger half brother, Tam, in 1990. The film lingers on the rigours of the voyage: the sampan, the Malaysian detention camps, the illegal refugee ship and the underground economy with near slavery in New York City, and finally with Binh's search for his father.