Capturing an Ex-POW’s Return to Hanoi : Television: Filmmaker follows U.S. ambassador for months to create documentary that will air on PBS.

In 1973, U.S. Air Force Capt. Douglas “Pete” Peterson came home from Vietnam after serving 6 1/2 harrowing years as a prisoner of war there. Twenty-four years later, he returned to that nation as its first U.S. Ambassador in the postwar era.

At the time of Peterson’s appointment, documentary filmmaker Sandy Northrop also was moving to Vietnam (her husband, David Lamb, was named The Times’ Southeast Asia bureau chief). Peterson’s tale caught Northrop’s eye.

“It’s one of these things where you hear the story, and it’s too good to be true,” says Northrop, whose one-hour film for PBS, “Pete Peterson: Assignment Hanoi,” airs tonight at 10 p.m. on KVCR, with KCET-TV planning a Veteran’s Day run. “All the written reports made him out to be better than any person could be.”

When Northrop and her husband were invited to meet the new ambassador, she used the opportunity “to see if this guy was all he’s cracked up to be.” He was, she says. So from February to May 1998, Northrop followed Peterson around Vietnam to create a personal portrait of the ambassador that resonates on a political level as well.

“Having been a POW, [Peterson] said he could look back and always be angry,” Northrop recalls. “But he chose to look forward.” It is that remarkable outlook that seems to pervade almost every aspect of Peterson’s private and public life captured by the film. Whether it’s in meetings with Vietnamese Americans unwilling to recognize their former homeland’s Communist-led government, or with the government leaders warily attempting to jump start their nation’s struggling economy with an influx of capitalist investments, Peterson’s upbeat attitude is palpable.

But as much as Peterson may prod the Vietnamese to enter the global marketplace, it seems old habits die hard. Northrop says that for the two weeks prior to her film’s June premiere in Hanoi, the nation’s Ministry of Culture was preparing to ban the screening. Two days prior to the screening, the ministry backed down. And that happened only after Northrop blacked out two sections of the film (for that screening only). The first is a scene in which Vietnamese American protesters wave a South Vietnamese flag. The second contains archival footage of Vietnam’s war with Cambodia, a border incursion with China, and Vietnamese citizens--later referred to as “boat people”--fleeing their native country.

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Northrop believes the government’s misgivings about the film had less to do with any particulars than it did with its overall message. “There are no heroes in a Communist society,” she says. “Peterson has come in and become a superhero.”

With the making of this film, Northrop performed some feats of her own. Using the Sony DXR 1000 digital camera, she dispensed with the traditional three-man film crew and became a one-woman band--producing, directing, shooting and editing the documentary mostly by herself.

It was a welcome change for Northrop, whose credits include more than 10 years of producing wildlife films for the National Geographic Society, as well as her own 1989 documentary “How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?,” about a pianist’s first recital at the famed New York auditorium. For most of her 27-year career, Northrop says cameras were so cumbersome: “as a 5-foot, 3-inch woman, I simply could not lift them.” Now that she can, she’s brought a new sensibility to her work.

“The perspective of someone shooting at 5-foot, 3 inches is different than that of a cameraman who is 6-foot, 3 inches,” she points out only half-jokingly. “We’re always looking up.”

But that seems a fitting angle from which to capture Peterson’s lofty persona. If the ambassador’s return to Vietnam helped him to reconcile with his past, then making the documentary enabled Northrop to do the same.

“I was a good hippie,” says the 51-year-old filmmaker, who graduated from the University of Michigan in 1969 and moved to Berkeley, a hotbed of anti-war activity. “It was easy to be a hippie. It was the thing to do at that age. For those of us who were protesting, there was an excitement to it, but I don’t think a lot of us understood the seriousness of what we were really dealing with.”

Although she stands by her antiwar position, Northrop suggests that the battles she and her peers waged at home in the 1960s were, in many ways, as flawed as those waged abroad. “I hear the stories of the American soldiers that came home and were spit on, and I don’t like that,” she says, frankly. “They were kids, too. And for the most part, they didn’t ask to go. They went over and did their job. It was easy for me to make my choice. I was sitting there protesting and there was no one shooting at me. There were no clear decisions I had to make about right and wrong.”

* “Pete Peterson: Assignment Hanoi,” airs tonight at 10 p.m. on KVCR. KCET plans to air the documentary on Veteran’s Day.