Pulaski (pop. 7, 871), off I-65 down from Music City Tennessee USA, is known as the Ku Klux Klan birthplace, Christmas Eve, 1865. Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco’s Daughter from Danang briefly records the yearly hood-and-sheeted parade there, alongside moments of cheerleader spirit and cornpone accents asserting that "We made a Southerner out of [Heidi], real quick." A balanced picture might have also included: the local college; the late book club housed across from the grand County Courthouse; the property owner who bolted the Klan historical marker face to the wall when ordered to replace it; an annual Brotherhood Parade; and the town’s ingenious silencing of a 1969 Aryan Nation rally.

So, too, one wishes that the adoptive Pulaski mother of Mai Thi Hiep—rechristened Heidi—had consented to give her version of the souring of their family relationship. Others in the community and family do, indeed, comment, but the absent woman—currently a dean at a college—did, after all, once care enough to assume the responsibility of single parenthood.

Whatever the two sides, Heidi Bub, now married to an engaging, humorous career Navy officer and herself the mother of young daughters, searches for her biological mother -- like many an adopted child.

The filmmakers intelligently use minimal archival footage to recall the brutal war in Vietnam. They alternate between Heidi and her world—growing up she was cautioned to hide her origins—and Mai Thi Kim, the birth mother. Frantic amidst U.S. withdrawal (Heidi’s real father was an American naval officer), plus the fall of the South and stories of slaughter of Amerasian innocents, Kim chose to save the seven-year-old’s life through 1975’s well-intentioned but callous and disorganized "Operation Babylift."

Thus, the apprehensions and feelings of guilt of both mother and daughter are well to the fore even before their painfully emotional meeting at Danang International Airport. Traveling with the female Vietnamese-American consultant who helped in the search, Heidi is at first ecstatic about rediscovering her roots, supposedly finding out who she is and experiencing the loving embrace of her three half-siblings, their father (a Viet Cong soldier away during the conflict) and her mother.

But life lies at great depths. As social scientists might claim, acculturation is more than skin deep, stronger than genetics. Faded sad snapshots cannot in themselves remake the past or bring it back to life. By her admission, Heidi is "101% Americanized": she speaks only "Southern" English, is bothered by local sanitary conditions, unwrapped food, native markets and smells, uneasy with another culture’s twenty-four-hour love and touching.

The reunion, programmed for a week, quickly oppresses her so, that by day five she wishes it could be undone. Worse, as is understandable and not that unusual, she is seen as inexhaustibly rich and generous because she's from the United States. Jane Austen recognized the timeless exclusive marriage of love and money, and Heidi’s new-found family members assume that, not having shared the burden all those lost years, she will naturally help them financially now, perhaps even take mother Kim to America. The young woman, so long mother- and fatherless, is overwhelmed by the moment, by what half-brother Tinh sees as mere misunderstanding arising in cultural and language differences.

I won’t betray the filmmakers’ effort by revealing the outcome, for that each must see for him- or herself, then consider and possibly judge. The delayed, incalculable personal and societal casualties of war are always there and should—but most often do not—figure in some way among those piles of national statistics. It’s too easy to fault the Americanized half-Vietnamese Hiep/Heidi with naïveté, but isn’t it both sides who approach the matter with understandable, ultimately unreasonable, expectations?

Dolgin and Franco do not flinch in the face of emotions almost too great to watch. Perhaps realizing well before their subjects—and I think so—what had to happen, they courageously continued to roll their documentary equipment. And those subjects, equally courageous, allow the camera to capture their naked hearts. The resultant film is today ever more pressing for a world on the doorstep of yet another of those quagmires called war, in which the total dead and wounded go beyond body counts and linger through the generations of man.

(No MPAA rating available.)