Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam

Streaming video - 1994

"A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot.". 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. (excerpted from article in The In...dependent by Susan Gerhard). “The sound track is layered with the cacophony of bustling city streets, the chirps of cicadas and gentle rustles of trees in the countryside, and the visuals, devoid of travelogue cliches, are a collage of pictorial snippets taken from unusual vantage points.... What comes through is such a strong sense of the place you can almost smell it.” Ted Shen, The Chicago Reader. "Brings up questions about what we see, how we see it, and who's doing the seeing. It's an honest, down-to-earth, and vividly sensual film." Kurt Wolff, San Francisco Bay Guardian. Screenings: Atlanta Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize; New York Film Expo, Best Documentary. more