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Author:
Janet Gardner
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Ms. Gardner's interest in Southeast Asia began when she covered post war Vietnam as a reporter for two New Jersey dailies and contributed to The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Nation. She began her career as a film editor at NBC's Today Show and WRC's News 4 Washington, and field produced for WNBC's NewsCenter 4. In 1980, as a staff writer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, she traveled to Canada to interview war resisters who crossed the border during the Vietnam War.
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JANET GARDNER
Producer/Director
Janet Gardner is an award-winning documentary producer known for her work on Southeast Asia. Her films include the documentaries The Last Ghost of War, about the several million Vietnamese, including children born deformed, believed to be victims of Agent Orange; Precious Cargo which follows on a trip to Vietnam from the U.S. young adult Vietnamese adoptees - orphans of war carried out of Saigon in Operation Babylift; Dancing Through Death: The Monkey, Magic & Madness of Cambodia, a documentary on the devastating effect of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge reign on Cambodia; A World Beneath the War, which showed the Vietnam War from the villagers' point of view; Vietnam: Land of the Ascending Dragon, which provided an overview of Vietnamese history and culture from post-war Vietnam to the present; The United Nations: It's More Than You Think; and two series on runaway children, Children of the Night and Starting Over.
Janet also made Siberian Dream - about the cultural journey of a young woman out of the Russia of the Iron Curtain back to Russia of Glasnost and Perestroika. This film was finished with a Film Finishing Grant from Women In Film Foundation.
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WORKING AS A FILMMAKER IN VIETNAM AND CAMBODIA
I produced my first film on Vietnam in 1993 when my documentary company was two years old. and before "normalization of relations". The US still had an embargo against Vietnam at that time, a prohibition against trading with the enemy (lifted in 1994). Since then I've completed five films in Southeast Asia. They're all non-fiction films, and they've been broadcast on PBS stations, and internationally by Discovery Networks, National Geographic Channels International and STARTV in Asia and the Middle East..
Some of the filmmakers who go to Vietnam sneak around and try to play tourist with digital cameras. A lot of the Vietnamese Americans who speak the language and want to tell their personal stories have done that, and it seems to work for them, so they don't really feel they have to go through the bureaucracy. But since I was trained as a journalist and want to be treated as a journalist, I usually have a journalist's visa.
What does that mean? The police have my passport. That's the first thing that you do when you go to Vietnam as a journalist is you register with the Department of Foreign Affairs, and they take your passport to the police. So you're in the computer; they want to know where you are, where you're going, who you work for and where this is going to air, and so I work within those government confines.
I first went to Vietnam in 1987 as a member of an educator's delegation. It was a Quaker-inspired organization. There were about twelve of us; many of them were Vietnam veterans traveling from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. It was a delegation dedicated to peace and reconciliation and at a time when relations between the United States and Vietnam were particularly frosty. In fact, the State Department interviewed us in Bangkok , tried to talk us out of it, but they weren't successful. According to them, we were breaking the 12 year U.S. trade and travel embargo, which was against travel to the country of a former enemy. You would have thought that we were still at war with Vietnam from their attitude.
Then, when we got there, the Vietnamese government kept tabs on us, making sure we didn't take pictures of public transportation hubs or military bases. We were also aware that the State Department was keeping tabs on our activities "in country", though slightly more distant tabs We hung out at the Billabong Bar in the Australian Mission, explored a country that most Americans were totally unfamiliar with, and studied a war that most Americans were trying to forget. We learned all about the other wars Vietnam had been involved in, and I began learning about Vietnamese history and about their well-honed, time-honored military strategies
I was a print journalist at the time, and I wrote about the trip for the Boston Globe Travel Section, and it was reprinted in a few magazines, so I gradually got my feet wet.
The first film I made in Vietnam was a cultural overview - this was the one in 1993 made for a series, Video Visits, for International Video Network. The U.S. State Department, instead of becoming more reasonable by then, threatened to freeze our assets because we were going there; not that our assets were very impressive, but they were going to freeze them anyway. A film about cultural history or not, they didn't want us going there. And the Vietnamese censor had us cut two things: one was a woman squatting who they said was passing water, peeing in other words, which was not evident to me certainly. And there was a little boy smoking a cigarette in the background.
Now that the embargo has lifted, if you're on a journalist visa and registered with them, you can expect that the government may still want to see all your raw footage, after which they tape the tapes up, put on an official stamp and expect you not to open them up again until you leave the country. They have many concerns including the need to fight pornography. In some cases, they may escort you to the airport after your footage has been taped and stamped. And it is likely you will also have to pay a fee to the censors.
Film making is definitely part of the new "market economy". That was symbolized in a cartoon I saw in a local newspaper showing a camera man with a balloon above his head filled with dollars.
We were on our own in Cambodia, ironically, because the Cambodian government was still dealing with the ghost of the Khmer Rouge. We had to be on our guard and we traveled with security, particularly at night. When we arrived in Siem Reap where the temples of AngkorWat are located, we could hear gunfire and explosions in the distance. We were not allowed to go to the outer temples. With the help of "monkey dancer", Thavro Phim, and his family, we were able to make Dancing Through Death: The Monkey, Magic & Madness of Cambodia. This film chronicled the devastating effect of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge reign on Cambodian dancers and their centuries-old tradition of storytelling.
In Vietnam, we made "A World Beneath the War," a story about the tunnels, a story of resistance against U.S. bombers by a village that went underground. This is a story the Vietnamese were very proud of. The baby lift story, Precious Cargo, was more difficult; that's the story of the Vietnamese adoptees who were airlifted out of Saigon at the end of the war . Some Vietnamese tried to talk us out of telling this very complicated story. We decided to go ahead, however, and as a result it had over 500 broadcasts on PBS stations and was licensed by National Geographic Channels International and translated into Thai and Chinese.
Now that we've come to understand the bureaucracy, I should say that the most surprising thing I've found there is that the Vietnamese could forgive. I'm speaking of a lot of people who were able to move on and didn't hold grudges despite the horrible things that American military had done there. The tunnels were an incredible example, a whole village forced to go underground to survive. We saw how they survived in those tunnels, simply hard to believe, and yet they forgave and moved on. That and the beauty of the land really stand out for me.
I love the people and the country there and in Cambodia, and have come to see shooting there as a challenge. Now that my partner in the Gardner Group, Pham Thai, and I are fairly well-known there, people in the Department of Foreign Affairs tend to cut us some slack. Thai and I agree that it's out of respect for their elders - but it's also because we generate a lot of work there. In this new market economy, they call Thai "Chu," which means uncle in Vietnamese, and they call me "Ba," which means madam or auntie. We appreciate the respect but I liked it better during the embargo, when it was rough and poor, but more friendly, when they called him "An" and me "Chi," meaning friend.
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