In Kim Thúy’s 2009 semi-autobiographical novel Ru, the narrator Nguyễn An Tịnh recalls her family’s experience in a refugee camp in Malaysia. She describes the makeshift cabin that several families built out of felled trees, burlap and nylon rice bags, and plywood panels to better shelter them:
If a choreographer had been underneath the plastic sheet on a rainy day or night, he would certainly have reproduced the scene: twenty-five people, short and tall, holding a tin can to collect the water that dripped off the roof, sometimes in torrents, sometimes drop by drop. If a musician had been there, he would have heard the orchestration of all that water striking the sides of the tins. If a filmmaker had been there, he would have captured the beauty of the silent and spontaneous complicity between wretched people. But there was only us, standing on a floor that was slowly sinking into the clay…
These passages from Ru lend themselves naturally to a film adaptation. Tịnh the narrator is already looking outside of herself through cinematic vignettes, preemptively imagining how a choreographer, a musician, a filmmaker would capture the details of her story. After an almost decade-long journey, this project was actualized. As associate producer, author Kim Thúy was highly involved in the film production process of Ru and worked closely with French-Canadian director Charles-Olivier Michaud. Filmed during the peak winter season of Montreal, in the French and Vietnamese languages, Ru distinguishes itself as cinéma Québécois. The film also adds a Vietnamese refugee story to the recently growing number of Asian Canadian films like Riceboy Sleeps (2022, dir. Anthony Shim) and Golden Delicious (2022, dir. Jason Karman). Ru the movie premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and was released in theaters across Quebec in November 2023. Ru was the feature film for this year’s Viet Film Fest (VFF) Red Carpet Opening. The Canadian actress Chantal Thuy, in the role of the mother Nguyen An Tĩnh, won VFF’s Best Actress award.
The film Ru captures moments from the young Tịnh’s (Chloé Djandji) final days after the fall of Saigon, to the escape by boat, to the Malaysian refugee camp, to the family’s adjustment to life in Granby. The film’s nonlinear storytelling and minimal dialogue preserves the poetry of Kim Thúy’s text, and the orchestral score and precious moments of silence sanctify these ordinary moments of detailed observation. In broad strokes, Ru celebrates a refugee family’s resilience in the aftermath of war, as well as the generosity of Canadian sponsors in the late 1970s. As Thúy intended, the movie succeeds as a love letter to the town of Granby and the Canadian community that shaped her from a shy young girl like Tịnh to the person she has become today.
At the same time, Ru leans into the discomfort of staring for too long, inviting further inquiry into another diasporic story of refugee gratitude to sponsors, the difficulties of assimilation, and images of the archive. There are multiple instances in the movie when Tịnh and the camera’s gaze linger a little too long for the viewer to comfortably discern if there is something amiss, whether it is harm or humor they should watch out for. In one scene, the eager families and sponsors of the white town of Granby immediately surround the newly arrived Vietnamese refugees with cheerful smiles and clapping. The white people’s expressions are warm and well-meaning, but the camera lingers a little longer on how the Vietnamese look back with their own curious gaze—a gaze that Tịnh maintains throughout the movie. What is the proper expression for a Vietnamese refugee to have, after braving a boat journey of last resort, after surviving with the bare minimum at a refugee camp, to arrive in a strange land among strangers and snow? I am drawn to the refugee’s unreadable gaze, which we can expect to contain gratitude, but there is also room for tiredness, grief, suspicion and anxiety, and even incredulity and humor. Ultimately, Ru chooses to frame the Vietnamese people’s early interactions with Granby with endearing awkwardness. Indeed, there is an absurd gap in what the Vietnamese refugees experienced and what the Granby sponsors can only read in the news. It is a wonder if they could ever understand each other; it is more wonderful that they wish to try, with their generosity and pure intent.
As a film set in 1970s Vietnam and Canada, Ru alternates between reproducing and providing new angles to “boat people” imagery from the archives. As beautiful as it is, I feel uneasy about Ru’s camera gaze. At times, I appreciate that the directing seems ready to recognize individual pain, thus resisting the anonymity of collective Vietnamese suffering in Hollywood and Vietnam War archives. For example, the camera slowly pans over each Vietnamese person as they are starved, dehydrated, losing hope on the boat journey; the viewer focuses on and remembers this portrait of a Vietnamese individual in pain. Yet, other times, the directing chooses the overhead shot to show Vietnamese refugees suffering en masse as they desperately climb out of one boat to find safety in another. The harrowing image of the boat drifting at sea is synonymous with “boat people”—from this aerial view, a headcount is all we get, no faces or expressions. The birds-eye view is aesthetic, eerie, breath-taking, but also oppressive, distant from the viewer. I am uncomfortable with the spectacle of the boat from this power angle, upset by another haunting image of helpless Vietnamese refugees on behalf of my parents’ generation. But I imagine that my mother would react differently than me. Her reaction to the boat scenes shot in Journey from the Fall (2006, dir. Ham Tran), a Vietnamese American film about the hardships of the re-education camp, boat journey, and assimilation to the US, was more of validation of her experience. Here was a wordless and powerful medium to tell me, her daughter, that her journey was indeed that “khổ,” that they suffered immensely, worse than what I see here.
Ru’s minimal dialogue forces the viewer to pay close attention to the visual story’s elements and make assumptions to piece together a narrative. For the Vietnamese viewer, this can mean pulling from their family’s archives, recalling from stories told in passing of how they had to sew gold into their clothes before making the escape. Still, Ru contains thought-provoking scenes with momentous poetic value that may not be fully appreciated unless one reads the novel, particularly those involving the Việt Cộng soldiers who lived in Tịnh’s home for a period of time in order to clear out their possessions. And so it is true that a great adaptation is one that inspires us to return to the source material so that we can understand a little better. Ru the movie weaves a story around the childhood excerpts of the novel, so there is still much more to discover about Tịnh’s story and the drama of her extended family, as she becomes an adult who even finds her way back to Vietnam for work. Through oral history, the documentary A Moonless Night: Boat People, 40 Years Later, directed and produced by Thi Be Nguyen and Marie-Hélène Panisset in 2016, presents a multitude of stories from the Vietnamese refugees who settled in Quebec, in addition to the specific experiences of Kim Thúy’s family. Ru as film is an artistic preservation of immigrant resilience, of community. It has also been personally healing for its Vietnamese Canadian cast and Kim Thúy herself, as children of the diaspora. Ru is an impressive breakthrough for Vietnamese Canadian film, hopefully ushering in a wave of Vietnamese Canadian stories for the big screen in the years to come.
Ru was included in Viet Film Fest 2024.
Cathy Duong co-hosts cà phê book club, a monthly book club that meets in coffee shops across north Orange County, CA (IG: @caphebookclub). She enjoys traveling to Little Saigons, playing V-pop on her ukulele, and analyzing diasporic Viet literature.
