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Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam

Prismatic Ground • 32m

Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 1994 • 33 minutes

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 'Vietnam' 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. (-The Independent Film and Video Monthly)

Tags
20th century, anthropology and archaeology, area studies, asia, asian studies, communication and media studies, cultural and ethnic studies, cultural anthropology, doc, experimental, expository, family issues, film and video studies, film history, freedom, gender studies, history, icarus films, independent, indie, liberty, lynne sachs, multicultural studies, ovid, ovid_ca, recreation and sports, sexism, sibling, sister, social studies, sociology, southeast asia, tourism, travel, vietnam, vietnam era, vietnam1, which way is east, which way is east: notebooks from vietnam, woman, women, women's, women's studies, world history, world regions

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