Posted on 10/12/2002 4:47:59 PM PDT by Pokey78
Vietnam's best-known actor has been branded a "national traitor", threatened with jail and banned from filming for five years for his portrayal of a North Vietnamese general in the film We Were Soldiers starring Mel Gibson.
The case came to light last week after his Hollywood co-stars launched a publicity campaign for his release, embarrassing Vietnam's rulers at a time when they are hoping to attract foreign investment.
In the film, shot in America and released earlier this year, Don Duong played the late Gen Nguyen Huu, the commander of the North Vietnamese forces, whose troops are massacred after he is tactically outwitted by his American opponents.
Most Vietnamese films portray the Americans as arrogant imperialists and Vietnam's forces as unbeatable righteous nationalists.
The country's National Film Censorship Council issued a statement accusing Duong of having "lost his honour among the people" and becoming "an instrument in the hands of forces hostile to the Vietnamese nation".
The dream of Hollywood fame turned into a nightmare for Duong, once eulogised by Vietnam's Communist Party for his acting abilities, after he was arrested 10 days ago at his home in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon.
He was questioned by officials of the secretive PA-25, a branch of the police that oversees cultural affairs, and at the end of a day-long interrogation he was asked to sign a statement professing guilt as a traitor.
He refused, according to members of his family in America, and was told he would be banned from filming for five years and could face jail and a fine.
Mel Gibson joined Patrick Swayze and Forrest Whitaker, who appeared with Duong in the Vietnam war film Green Dragon, in organising a campaign to bring pressure on America's State Department to use diplomatic channels to call for his rehabilitation.
Gibson said that the actor was being 'unfairly stigmatised' for his part in the film. "We Were Soldiers showed the courage of the Vietnamese soldiers," he said. "Nothing he did brought dishonour to the Vietnamese people. I think he showed artistic courage."
The actor Harvey Keitel, the film-maker Randall Wallace and Ken Brecher, the executive director of the Sundance independent film institute, have also spoken out on his behalf.
For Duong, it is an extraordinarily fast fall from grace. He is a veteran of more than 50 features, one of a small group of Asian actors able to find regular work in Hollywood.
Duong was raised in Dalat in central Vietnam with four sisters and one brother and attended a Roman Catholic boarding school.
Originally Duong studied to become a pharmacist, but took up acting in 1982 and was soon making his mark in locally made, officially approved films that often glorified the struggle of the Vietnamese against American forces.
He is a favourite with young women, who last year disrupted filming on location in Hanoi by mobbing him for autographs.
It is this very success that is believed to be partly responsible for his present predicament. "If you are a public figure you have to be very careful here," said a Vietnamese journalist, who asked not to be named.
There is a simmering resentment among many in officialdom against anyone who becomes successful in the West, particularly in America, the old enemy.
Vietnam remains one of the few, old-style one-party Communist states left in the world. Literature, films, radio, television and the press are rigidly censored and controlled. The media carries regular warnings of the dangers of Western cultural influences and rails against the pernicious effects of gambling, drugs and prostitution.
In recent months, the authorities have detained a steady stream of government critics. A doctor, Pham Hong Son, was jailed after he translated an article from the web site of the State Department entitled "What is Democracy?" and sent it to friends and senior Vietnamese officials.
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