A Filmmaker’s Struggle to Capture the ‘Real’ Vietnam : Movies: His countrymen, says Dang Nhat Minh, have seen the real face of war up close. As a film audience, they will not accept ‘a false face.’

If you think Hollywood seems obsessed with films about the Vietnam War, consider Dang Nhat Minh.

Minh, who is secretary general of the filmmakers’ union of Vietnam, has devoted six of his last seven features to the war. His latest, “Only One Person Remains Alive,” is a two-part, made-for-television melodrama about a dissident American doctor who is tracked down by a palpably evil U.S. military command in Saigon and loses his heart to a gorgeous Viet Cong cadre. So far, no calls from the networks.

In the film, the hero (played by a Eurasian actor because of the lack of Vietnamese-speaking Europeans) is also a victim of the war.

“He is not our enemy,” Minh said over coffee in his cramped office.

The Vietnamese people, he said, have seen the real face of war up close. As a film audience, they will not accept “a false face,” although Vietnamese cinema, like much of Asian drama, is fairly histrionic.

Minh has become a dedicated student of American films about the war, although in general he doesn’t much care for them.

“My sense,” he said, “is that they describe a false aspect of the war. Vietnamese are seen as animals.”

He likes “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon,” the latter so much so that war scenes from it have been included in his latest film. At the bottom of his list are “Rambo” and “Full Metal Jacket.”

“ ‘Platoon’ was close to a documentary,” he said, “even though we don’t look like that (director Oliver Stone used Filipino actors to portray Vietnamese).”

In 1985, Minh won a Special Jury Award at the Hawaii International Film Festival for “When the Tenth Month Comes,” a war film that shows no fighting.

His other films have touched on some sensitive issues in a country still governed by an orthodox Communist system.

“The Young Girl in the River,” for example, focuses on the troubles of a prostitute after the war, a time when such women were being sent to re-education camps. She is betrayed by a Communist apparatchik whose life she had saved, and a former officer of the South Vietnamese regime turns out to be her savior.

While hardly earthshaking in the West, the film raised eyebrows in Vietnam.

“I try to make films through the eyes of an individual,” Minh said, reproaching American filmmakers for taking what he regards as the prototype approach of American good guy and Vietnamese villain.

Born and raised in South Vietnam, Minh, who is now 51, moved with his parents to Hanoi in 1950. His father, a physician, founded a resistance medical school and was killed by American bombs.

While describing himself as self-taught in the movie business, Minh received formal cinema training in Bulgaria in 1976. In 1985, he won a scholarship to France, where he became enthralled but was obliged to work on a shoestring budget, which is evident in even his most ambitious projects. Yet even on a tiny budget he manages to capture his country at its most poignant.

Minh said his greatest ambition is to collaborate with Americans on a war film, using Vietnamese actors in Vietnam.

“Both sides will invest materially and spiritually in such a film,” he said. “To be the finest film about Vietnam, it will have to be made by Vietnamese and Americans together.”

Even Minh occasionally tires of the war. He said the Vietnamese people have moved on to other interests.

“Peasants don’t want to see films about peasants with water buffalo,” he said. “Nothing is as familiar to the Vietnamese as the war.”