Doc Edge 2025 Craccum Coverage | Child of Dust
Review of Child of Dust Documentary (Dir. Weronika Mliczewska). Doc Edge 2025 Craccum Coverage.
Review by Toby Tomkinson
The documentary opens in the shadow of the Fall of Saigon, tracing the aftermath through the life of Ngo Thanh Sang, a bụi đời - one of the many Amerasian children left behind after American troops withdrew. What unfolds is less a portrait of wartime consequence than a close, grounded look at a life shaped by abandonment, migration, and fractured identity. Sang’s early years are marked by displacement, handed off between relatives, subject to physical punishment over the slightest issue, and eventually fleeing to Saigon at fourteen. He raises a daughter, then granddaughter after his daughter leaves, and later raises himself into a man navigating a foreign country, its language, and its bureaucracy. His father, Torres, fought in Vietnam between 1966 and ‘67, returned to the U.S., and disconnected from all his children - American and Vietnamese alike. The documentary highlights clear parallels between them: neither man grew up with a father, both grappled with distance, absence, and late-stage responsibility. Torres, in therapy and aging, reaches out, and we see how his other children have been affected as well. Throughout these events, Sang roots himself in family. His focus is on his grandson, whom he stays in America for, despite his ambivalence toward the country. The direction and cinematography avoid spectacle. Everyday life in Vietnam - apartments, scooters, cooking - grounds the film in the ordinary. Lighting, sound, and pace stay unobtrusive. It doesn’t push an emotional arc; it sits with generational fracture, with the quiet realities of lives left to settle after war.
Child of Dust Trailer
Doc Edge Festival is in Auckland from 25 June through to 13 July. The festival will also be showing in Christchurch and Wellington (16 July - 27 July).
Child of Dust will be premiering in Auckland on the following dates:
- 6 July 2025 - 1:15pm - Bridgeway Cinema (Including Q&A with Director Weronika Mliczewska)
