Witness to cultural exchange and culture shock

Marlo Poras’ apartment is empty, save for an inherited couch, a desk and a box spring. That’s because this is her first apartment since she packed her bags for Vietnam several years ago to escape her life in the film business, working for Martin Scorsese’s Tribeca Films in New York. Many thousands of miles and days later -- having traveled with her movie camera from Hanoi through the American South, then crashed in her childhood bedroom between jaunts through the country’s film festival circuit -- Poras can finally settle once again.

She’ll be moving a host of festival documentary awards into her new home, including the audience award from South by Southwest, and a new one she picked up Friday in Los Angeles: the International Documentary Assn. award for feature documentary. Not bad for a first film.

“Mai’s America,” Poras’ movie, is the story of Mai Nguyen, a spunky exchange student from Hanoi whose Hollywood concepts of America are shattered when she is placed with a depressed and unemployed white family in rural Mississippi.

Her eyes are further opened to some of the country’s cultural realities when she moves into the home of another host family, a married black Southern Baptist couple in their early 20s. Mai finds friendship in a compassionate and flamboyant local drag queen, as well as two Vietnamese Americans whose experience of their adopted country and their homeland vary widely from her own.

And that’s just the first year of her journey. Nguyen’s second year brings her from the classrooms of Tulane, where she begins her college degree, to the nail salons of Detroit, where she is forced to work when she runs out of tuition money.

“Some people don’t believe it’s a documentary -- it seems like narrative, like this only exists in fiction,” Poras says, chuckling. But that’s hardly the focus of discussion about this discourse-generating film. Poras’ movie has agitated Vietnamese Americans with its empathetic story of a modern girl from the communist North who finds herself at a remove from not only Anglo America, but also from the Vietnamese immigrants she meets in her travels, a community connected to a frozen image of prewar Vietnam she’s too young to know.

Many people who have strong and painful memories of Vietnam before the war refuse to watch the story of a daughter of Hanoi, and some of those who do opt for a screening don’t make it past Nguyen’s performance of the Ho Chi Minh song for her history class.

“The older generation hears that song, and no matter what the film actually says, they will only see it as a propaganda piece. It’s what they know,” says Hung Quoc Nguyen, an organizer in the Vietnamese community in and around Washington, D.C., who used the film to generate discussion about the clash between not just North and South Vietnam, but also about discrepancies between the lives of people who stayed and those who left.

“But for younger professionals like me, we’ll say we’ll bear through this and watch the rest of the film and try to put our own personal judgments aside. And then we can think about it together.” That collective thinking has kept the message board at PBS’ “P.O.V.,” where the film ran in August, buzzing for months with postings of outrage and support.

A vibrant, young Vietnam

Until recently, there was basically no public information about the people of North Vietnam. During the years Poras was based in Hanoi, she would return to the States on a visit and find herself bombarded with questions about the North Vietnamese -- how they lived, what they thought about Americans, what kinds of attitudes they had about the war.

The Vietnam she experienced was extraordinarily young and vibrant -- 60% of its population is under 25 -- its thoughts about America drawn more often from bootleg Arnold Schwarzenegger films and Mariah Carey CDs than memories of artillery fire in the Mekong Delta. To tell their story, she decided to tell Nguyen’s story, and to make the first film to introduce an American audience to a teen from the North.

Victoria Nguyen (no relation to either the film subject or the community organizer), an L.A.-based television journalist who hosts a daily talk show on the Saigon Broadcasting Network, says that before she saw “Mai’s America,” she would have never imagined that she could relate to a young woman from Hanoi.

“It’s the first time I’ve been able to see a documentary about a woman with Mai’s background. Before, I would have never sat down to watch it. But I saw comments on the Net good and bad. And when I saw the film, I cried. I was surprised that I could open myself up and put myself into her situation, but it was impossible not to. I was shocked. I thought I could have shut everything out and said, ‘Why should I care?’ But I was wrong.”

“It means everything to me what people in the community think,” says Poras, a pixie-like 31-year-old with sharp eyes and a quick, ironic smile.

“I mean, here I am, this Jewish, white American girl making this film, right? It’s really important to me how Vietnamese Americans receive this story.”

That’s how Poras got into the film biz -- telling stories.

As a history major at Washington University, she realized that documentary film was a great way to record personal histories -- “it was like a lightbulb went off” -- and her interest in movies grew from there. She moved to New York after graduation and took whatever production assistant jobs she could find.

“I was horrible at it. I’d be sent out for envelopes, go buy some gum for myself and come back without the envelopes,” she says. “And cutting up strawberries for people’s cereal wasn’t exactly connecting me with the creative side of things.”

A number of colleagues suggested Poras apprentice as an editor, which could lead to work on features and documentaries. “I literally went out knocking on doors,” she says. Poras instantly landed a job working on the indie dysfunctional family comedy “The Daytrippers,” which led to a dream gig at Tribeca Films, working with the noted Thelma Schoonmaker on Scorsese’s “Casino” and Allison Anders’ “Grace of My Heart.”

“It was like I’d landed in nirvana. One of my first days at work, Scorsese shows us ‘Raging Bull’ in his private screening room. We’re all sitting on these lush leather seats, and he’s talking about making the movie. I was on cloud nine.”

But the euphoria didn’t last. Poras’ work at Tribeca was isolating, frustrating and, she thought, divorced from the creative practice of moviemaking. Eventually, she turned down such choice offers as one to work on “Great Expectations.”

“I realized that if you spend your life as an editor, you work on two or three films that you love. That’s it. And I realized feature film wasn’t the place for me.”

A friend and mentor shook Poras one day after two consecutive all-nighters and told her to get out. “This is a gilded coffin, but a coffin all the same.”

‘Transfixed’ by Vietnam

Poras gave up her stellar position and her New York apartment, and boarded a plane for Vietnam, where a friend had gone to do public health work. Born on a military base in Kentucky during the Vietnam War, Poras has always been fascinated by that country. “The moment I stepped off the plane I was completely transfixed,” she says. And most important, she had gotten herself as far as possible from the world of filmmaking. But her friend had other ideas for Poras and surreptitiously crafted a job for her producing AIDS education videos. “I was furious, like, ‘What kind of a friend are you! Haven’t you seen how miserable I’ve been? Haven’t you listened to a word I said?’ ”

Poras, however, gave in to her friend’s pressure, and consequently came closer to documentary filmmaking than she ever had in New York. Two years of immersion in Hanoi’s culture led her to the story she needed to tell. She began teaching a program for U.S.-bound exchange students, where she met many students, including Mai Nguyen, and she didn’t return home until it was time to follow the students to the States.

For nearly three years, Poras filmed Nguyen’s experiences, revealing as much -- if not more -- about the contradictions of this country as those in Vietnam. She moved back to her parent’s suburban Boston home, funding the project with her own savings, then tapping into her parent’s funds and finally receiving grants to finish the film.

“I realized this wasn’t just a story about Mai, but about the States through her eyes. Sure, it’s political, but in an organic sense, true to what was going on with Mai, trusting her story and her vision,” Poras says. “It’s not like there was stuff I wanted to say, just what I found interested, themes I was personally fascinated by. Whatever I would find that would make me think, I thought would make other people think as well.”

Although the film roams an expansive territory of ideas about American education and identity, ranging from transvestitism to higher-education funding to depression -- and the film’s online discussion board hums on all topics -- perhaps the most surprising dynamic Poras discovered was between Nguyen’s sense of Vietnam and that of her Vietnamese American friends. Her friends take her to a celebration for Vietnamese American immigrants at a Mississippi hotel, where she feels desperately out of place.

Nguyen sadly muses, “The Vietnamese in America are trying to hold on. Vietnam before the war is what they’re trying to hold on to. But that isn’t the Vietnam I left. I feel like we’re from different countries, different cultures.”

A controversial scene

The moment she heard those words, Poras knew the film would produce a profound response in the community. She screened the film for Vietnamese American student groups at Harvard and Wellesley while making the final cut.

At Harvard, she says, some students were furious about that scene, and about the sentiments encompassed in that moment that resonate through other parts of the film. Students argued vehemently about whether those elements should be cut out, whether they presented Vietnamese Americans as backward, or whether they revealed an important fissure that needed to be communicated.

“That’s when I knew how intense this was going to be,” Poras says, “and I just sat silently and watched it all happen.” At Wellesley, students had a very different response, much like that of talk show host Victoria Nguyen. “The women there kept repeating that in their wildest dreams they never thought they’d want to hear the perspective of a girl from the north of Vietnam. They said they felt their minds opening,” Poras says. “And I thought, what else could I want from this?”

Now, in her new apartment, once the festival schedule calms down and the awards are put away, Poras will be researching her next film, a somewhat mirroring project about cultural identity and the journey of immigration. It may not be Scorsese’s sumptuous screening room, and she certainly doesn’t have anyone cutting up strawberries for her cereal, but take notice. It’s all hers.