Interview with Stephane Gauger

The other day I read an interview with "Owl and the Sparrow" director Stephane Gauger. It discusses the film, Gauger's own story and Vietnamese society.

Gauger was born in Vietnam and came to the U.S. with his family when he was five years old. His mother is Vietnamese and his father was American.

I point that out because people have asked me, did you see any American babies over there? I always want to tell people that you can't define "American" by race or appearance, and two, they must be thinking of babies born to American soldiers and Vietnamese women during the war. In which case they'd be around my age, and I'm approaching 40.

So it's that level of a lack of understanding of present-day Vietnam that would make this film a completely different thing for most Americans than it would for me (an non-Vietnamese American who has traveled to Vietnam twice), and different still for Vietnamese Americans, and even more different for the Vietnamese in Vietnam.

But that could be what's brilliant about centering this film on characters who are children. They're much easier to relate to than adults are. There is also an elephant in the film, and he seems to me to be very easy to understand--his body language is just like that of the elephants who live at the Pittsburgh Zoo. (And yes, I talk to animals just like the people in the film do.)