Artists in Person

Sundance 2002 Grand Jury Prize for Documentary. In 1975, as the Vietnam War was ending, "Operation Babylift" brought thousands of orphans and Amerasian children to the United States. Mai Thi Hiep (renamed Heidi Neville) was one such child. Years later, estranged from her adoptive mother, she begins searching for her birth mother, Mai Thi Kim, who, it turns out, has also been searching for her. Twenty-two years after parting ways, mother and daughter are reunited in Vietnam. But what begins as a joyful reunion soon turns into heartache as cultural misunderstandings and dashed hopes pile up. Both women have difficulty reconciling their long-held dream of reunion with the reality that they have become strangers to one another, leading to a climactic emotional breakdown. Daughter from Danang is a complex, sensitive, and balanced portrait of one of the lesser-examined tragedies of war-innocents on the sidelines, whose wounds are invisible but whose loss continues to grow.