"Journey From the Fall" portrays family's anguish in postwar Vietnam

"The Americans have abandoned us. They broke their promise."

These are not the words of a nervous, liberated Iraqi but of a midlevel bureaucrat watching American forces withdraw from Saigon in 1975.

Devouring the final moments of a free Saigon, insurgents flood the streets striking confusion and terror into the South Vietnamese who believed American troops would always protect them. Thus begins the remarkable, deeply moving portrait of a little-known epoch of cultural history that is "Journey From the Fall."

Bewildered by communist rulers invading from the north, Long (Long Nguyen) and his wife, Mai (Diem Lien), reluctantly decide for safety's sake that he stay behind while she, their young son and his mother escape by joining the "boat people" until he can reunite with them.

Apart from a few wrenching scenes in movies like "The Killing Fields," we've never seen such an anguished and expressively precise study of the Vietnamese postwar experience. Making his feature debut, writer/director Ham Tran (who arrived in this country as a boat person when he was a toddler) gives extraordinary shades of nuance to his broadly stoked story of parallel journeys. They are intercut — though not always in simultaneous narrative threads — to show the father's futile existence in various "re-education" camps and his family's equally traumatic experience on their passage to a new life in Orange County, Calif.

Torture and boredom are glimpsed with comparable significance in the camp, alternately represented by beatings and "the box" or an earnest conversation on the proper way to consume insects. On the boat, the prospect of starvation, thirst and disease are nearly as fearsome as an assault by pirates.

A first-rate cast, script, committed director and physical production that burns with authenticity make "Journey From the Fall" affecting history for all who wish to avoid the doom of forgetting its lesson.

Ted Fry: tedfry@hotmail.com