Violent, traumatizing scenes flash on the screen — battles, bullets, children being cradled, people fleeing from Vietnam to refuge in America — as “New Wave,” the documentary, opens. These are the horrors of war as we’ve so often seen them. But unusually, danceable beats and hypnotic synths invade the archival footage of the final days of Saigon, when the U.
S. government swooped in to resettle more than 120,000 refugees airlifted to military bases in 1975, rescuing them after bloodshed that left lives still ravaged today. Filmmaker Elizabeth Ai, pregnant during the conception of the project, had been “grasping at straws” for how she would highlight stories about her ancestral inheritance for her unborn baby.
Then she remembered some familiar tunes. “As a child of the ’80s, I was obsessed with the teenagers who raised me — my parents were out of the picture and these teens, my uncles and aunts, stepped in. “When I was thinking of what I would share with my daughter,” Ai says, “new wave music popped into my head — the music was an anchor to some of my earliest and fondest memories.
Also, everything most Americans knew about the Vietnamese experience started and ended with violent Vietnam War movies or ghettoized versions of us. I figured it was time to flip the script and focus on a subculture that so few knew about.” And so “New Wave” was born.
The film will screen at Laemmle Glendale from Friday through Oct. 31. Expect mile-high hair.
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