Director Ha Le Diem should receive some credit for shining light on the harrowing practice of bride napping among the Hmong ethnic minority group in Northern Vietnam, but her attempt is exploitative and her post-production decisions unethical.
Viewers may be easily fooled given that Director Diem and the other Vietnamese characters are Asian like the Hmong family front and center, but there are long-standing power dynamics at play that the documentary does not address. The Hmong ethnic minority community portrayed is poverty-stricken, living in the uninhabitable, resource-deprived hills of Vietnam. You then have a Vietnamese director and some Vietnamese teachers who come in to try to "save" a poor, uneducated little girl from her own community. Switch the Vietnamese characters with White people and you can easily see the white savior framing bulldoze through.
The most problematic issue with this documentary is the harmfully incorrect English captions and apparent lack of cultural competency involved in post-production. At best, the Hmong to English translations are 70% accurate. Diem and her translation "team" chose to insert vulgar language to portray "crass" parents who don't care about their daughter, protagonist Di. As examples, Diem and team liberally added F-words to the Hmong mother and father's dialogues when there is no such equivalent word in the Hmong language. The team sprinkles in derogatory and misogynistic remarks when the parents address their pre-teen daughter, but these words were never said. There's high doubt that a professional translator was used at all, given the lack of culturally competent translations. It's unclear whether intentional or not, but the sinister translations and depictions of the parents frame them as 'bad guys' to blame for the bride napping. This has fueled the popularity of this documentary. If you thought the documentary flowed like a film, the framing is likely intentional - to the detriment of Di and her family.
If you never read the English captions and rely solely on the Hmong conversations, you'll find that Di's parents care about their daughter like any other parent would. They nag and tell her to stay away from boys - she's too young. They tell her to help around the house but let her be on her phone. They cry and are sad when they realize she might be getting married. In a poverty-stricken society with no support from the government, Hmong subsistence farmers rely heavily on the financial and social support of other Hmong families. Di's parents were stuck between a rock and a hard place: they want to dissolve the bride napping for their daughter, but they don't want to be ostracized by their community of Hmong families in doing so when word gets out. It's not as simple as not wanting to "lose face" - as many "professional," culturally incompetent critics would like to believe.
The second problematic issue with Diem is the consent and boundaries she crossed over and over again while filming. Numerous times, when told to stop, she turned her camera back on to film. She was never a fly in the wall as she so wanted to believe. Her opinions and actions directly impacted the protagonist family.
It's appalling that this documentary is short-listed for the Oscars. If Diem wants to provide some justice to the poor Hmong family that welcomed her into their homes for 3 years, she should hire a fluent Green Hmong and English translator and overhaul the captions completely. If she wants to be a better documentarian, she needs to think deeply about power dynamics and cultural competency.
Heck, the easiest first step is to stop calling the protagonist "Di" in English. Her name is Jee (pronounced like the letter G).
