RIIFF Films Examine What Happens When History Is Frozen in a Frame

“Is dreaming of yesterday enough to understand today?” This was the structuring question for the Providence Apple Cinemas’ programming of the Rhode Island International Film Festival (RIIFF), as voiced in Fading Tales, a strikingly photographed short film directed by Yernur Bashpay that combines Kazakhstan’s past and present through avant garde filmmaking techniques. Basphay mixes digital and film photography to capture a series of moments, some highly choreographed, others more naturalistic, of Kazakhstan’s Almaty region. Equal parts philosophical provocation and fashion film, it uses its four minutes to explore how efforts to preserve the past inform the present.

That was also the chief concern of Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom, a feature documentary directed by Kim Nguyen that screened after Fading Tales in its United States premiere. Examining the history of “Saigon Execution,” the photograph of South Vietnamese police chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan shooting Vietcong officer Lê Công Nà, Saigon Story follows the surviving family members of the men in the photo, examining how their lives have been shaped by the infamous event.

What becomes clear as the film cuts back and forth between the descendents (Nà’s children and the ex-wife of a soldier identified in the photo only as Vinh) is that outside of this act perpetuated and photographed 60 years ago, they have nothing in common. The failure to draw any meaningful parallels between them becomes one of the film’s most interesting ideas: that the power of this photograph, that captured a fraction of a second, defines their lives in the public eye more than their own actions.

Countless other killings occurred in the Vietnam War, but this is the one that happened to be captured on film, and those tangentially related to it are still processing what it means to be captured by history. The film’s subtitle, “Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom” refers to both the shooting of Nà by Loan, and the shooting of the picture by photographer Eddie Adams. Director Nguyen is at his best when he’s interrogating how images spread and which ones enter the zeitgeist, such as in an interview with Adams’ editor Hal Buell describing the transmission process by which they received the photo line by line while those at the New York office were out to lunch.

The documentary’s greatest moment, however, is when Nà’s surviving children are able to locate the site of his murder, allowing them to perform a Vietnamese Buddhist transcendence ceremony for his soul to be at peace. Director Nguyen films Nà’s son taking an iPhone picture of his hand holding up the historic picture to the modern day Saigon street — an image of an image being created, a photo of the past being captured at the location it’s brought them to in the present. “Is dreaming of yesterday enough to understand today?” Perhaps not, says Saigon Story, but examining yesterday may be just enough to bring some catharsis to today.