Jimmy In Saigon

There’s a photograph – just one surviving photograph – of two men together on a beach near Saigon: 24-year-old ex-army American Jimmy and 18-year-old Vietnamese Duñg. It sits at the centre of a documentary about kinship in the familial sense and kinship of that other sort which people who find themselves outside mainstream society often find in one another. Jimmy might have had both, if he’d known it, but his youngest brother, Peter, was only five years old when he died, and on the other side of the world.

For years Peter’s parents refused to talk about what had happened, and Peter grew up assuming that ‘died in Vietnam’ meant his brother had died in the war. It took him decades to reach a point where he was ready to pursue the truth, and to document it. Although his father is briefly seen in this film, he passed away from Alzheimer’s disease partway through. His mother is present throughout, and this is about her journey as well as his – taking her from Jimmy’s graveside, from a state of being so painful that she barely felt able to talk about it, to encounters which will, after all these years, bring back a little of the warmth she lost.

Filmmaking doesn’t get much more personal. We learn about the years before it happened – the few things Peter still remembers, and other incidents captured on tape. A short film called Archangel Blues which Jimmy made, starring his siblings - Mary, Ann, John and Andy as well as the one who would become a professional director. They all idolised their old brother, felt the same chill as any number of other families when he was drafted. Waiting, worried, they were cheered by letters which were carefully preserved. It’s through these letters – and others which arrived, after his death, from somebody who knew him – that Peter begins to reconstruct events after the war ended and Jimmy decided to stay. “I hate the fat, stupid, bourgeois people and the materialism,” says one of them of the US, but that was plainly not the whole of the story.

The fact that this film screened at Newfest might be seen as a clue to the mystery, but Peter is careful not to rush to conclusions. He’s gay – part of the film deals with his coming out, his loving but confused parents’ efforts to understand – and for that reason he feels a connection to a brother who didn’t fit in, regardless of the reason why. As he prepares to travel to a far-off country where he doesn’t speak the language in search of clues, he’s also acutely aware that Jimmy lived in a different cultural era. Historical details are woven throughout the film, reflecting on changes in Vietnamese as well as US culture, and we hear a little of one of Jimmy’s favourite songs, a tie to the past. The film took over a decade to make and during that time, too, there is change. But just when you think it’s going to be one of those ‘it was really all about the journey’ documentaries, a series of unexpected revelations brings us back to that photograph on the beach and a moment in time around which disparate lives have revolved.

Deftly edited with an eye for detail, this is a personal story which reminds us that history is comprised not simply of great events but of human experiences. It offers a different way of looking at a vanished time, and brings it closer to our own.