Nerakhoon (The Betrayal)

Once in a while a film comes along that leaves me feeling deeply humbled, as a filmmaker and as a human. The Betrayal is one such film. I knew I had to see it because of its amazing history - it was made over the course of 23 (!!!) years by the acclaimed cinematographer Ellen Kuras, in close collaboration with its main subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, who ended up as her co-writer and editor. But what I saw on screen was way beyond my expectations. I can think of few films that bring together this degree of creative vision, thoughtful application of craft, and commitment. And it moves me enormously that the relationship between documentarian and subject, which is always potentially problematic(*), turned gradually into one of close collaborators.

It's clear from the opening minutes that we're being taken on a journey. The film opens with shots of boys fishing on the Mekong River, and a myth - a Laotian prediction about the end of the world. We meet Thavi, speaking in the present, and his mother, interviewed in her kitchen, and we are soon immersed in the story of their family. The father, a soldier who worked with the Americans against Vietnamese and Lao Communist forces, is arrested shortly after U.S. forces leave and the Communist Pathet Lao regime takes over. Twelve-year-old Thavi swims across the Mekong River into Thailand, and waits for two years for his family to escape. Eventually, most of the family joins him and they make their way to the United States, where their hardships hardly diminish.

Cinema vérité would have been the easy, default approach to this film. It's certainly worked well in everything from Grey Gardens to Hoop Dreams. But Kuras goes in a totally different direction. Her approach is to focus on the subjects' internal journey, and on the way their memories inform and intersect with present-day reality. The past is represented partly with beautifully composed impressionistic shots filmed by Kuras herself, and partly with shots culled from Vietnamese propaganda films, which she and Phrasavath found in a Laotian archive, projected on a wall, and shot on 16mm film. (This is how documentary filmmaking often goes: a combination of careful planning and absolutely unexpected serendipity.) All this is combined with Thavi's poetic narration, which often has an epic quality, and revealing interviews with him and his mom.

After the film's screening at Hot Docs, Kuras talked about her desire to use dramatic elements but avoid having them look like docudrama (a very different approach from Air India 182, which is all about docudrama). One of her challenges, she said, was to shoot from her subject's point of view and then find a way to bring that person into the scene in an organic way, without having it look like docudrama. Whatever she did, it worked beautifully. I left feeling that I could learn more about filmmaking from The Betrayal than from any other film I'm likely to see at Hot Docs this year. This is a film I want to watch over and over.


(*) As explored in Jennifer Baichwal's The True Meaning of Pictures, which I also saw yesterday and hope to write about soon.