War in present tense : filming children of Agent Orange rehabilitation villages in Vietnam and the danger of misrepresentation

Abstract

We represent the Vietnam War as a concluded event in the past; however, the Agent- Orange-affected population in Vietnam shows that war is contemporary. This population remains relatively unknown to the world - especially to the Western world. We are isolated from the Agent-Orange-affected population because we have grown dependent on curated images of the Vietnam War in popular media that do not include the local population. Here, a challenging duty of a filmmaker is to create new images that convey their experience. This thesis will examine the filmmaking process of the contemporary population affected by Agent Orange in Vietnam and raise larger questions about the ways in which we capture contemporary war victims' stories through video. How can film revive engagements with a seemingly concluded war? How do we tell stories of people with visually apparent abnormalities without ostracizing them?