Season 5, Ep. 7: Journey From The Fall

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we're revisiting one of Asian America's rare historical epics: Ham Tran's Journey from the Fall fr om 2006. There's really no other film like it. It's the story that starts with the Fall of Saigon and traces a family's harrowing journey to Orange County. But unlike most classic Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War, which are usually told from the perspective of white male veterans and end when U.S. troops leave Vietnam, the Vietnamese American refugee struggle continues when they get to America.

There's a scene in the film on the boat with when the mother is looking at her young son and wondering - Will our children miss our homeland like we do? Will they ever understand? And Journey From The Fall is kind of the complex answer to that. The Vietnamese American community rallied together not only to fund this movie but to share their oral histories to help Ham Tran make something that their children and grandchildren could see, experience, and hopefully understand. And it still resonates today.