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Filmmaker Kates (right) with Vietnam veteran Linda McClenahan, one of her subjects and the chair of the California Vietnam Memorial Commission.
Filmmaker Kates (right) with Vietnam veteran Linda McClenahan, one of her subjects and the chair of the California Vietnam Memorial Commission.

Vietnam through Women's Eyes

Nancy Kates '84 was looking for a subject for her master's thesis in communication (documentary film and video) at Stanford when she came across an article about women veterans of the Vietnam War. "I was very interested in finding some of these women and getting interviews with them," says Kates, a former journalist in New York and Boston who had already produced four shorter documentaries.

The resulting 23-minute film, Their Own Vietnam, won the gold medal for documentary at the 1995 Student Academy Awards ceremony held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (Past student winners have included Spike Lee, Robert Zemeckis, and Bob Saget.)

"I wanted to make people think about how terrible war can be through the experiences of women who served in America's first fully televised war," Kates explains. The documentary profiles five women veterans, including a lesbian couple who met while serving "in country." Filmed interviews, archival footage, home movies, and stills illustrate the women's experiences, which range from witnessing the carnage in a military hospital to watching a close friend killed by a land mine.

Interviewing women with such powerful stories to tell was itself a challenge, and finding the right women to include was a long and arduous task. "I probably drove 2,000 miles around Northern California, having lunch with any woman veteran who was willing to talk to me," Kates recalls. "I did the interviews slowly over a couple of months. I called people all over the place-contacting different veterans groups, including a lesbian veterans organization, and even posting inquiries on the Internet." She interviewed about 60 women in all before deciding on the five who appeared in the film.

Kates worked with a small production crew, but did almost all the research, film editing, and interviews herself. She spent months searching film archives for images and, because of her tight budget (she paid most of the production costs herself), chose not to buy pristine footage owned by television networks, relying instead on film from public domain sources that was scratched, faded, or in some cases, literally falling apart. But, she says, "That gave my archival footage a sense of age and loss and inaccessibility that mirrors the way Americans think about the Vietnam war today."

The most difficult aspect of making a film, Kates says, can come unexpectedly from a relatively minor incident. "I was preparing the image near the end that shows a wall of statistics for the dead and missing on both sides of the war," Kates recalls, "when I just broke down and cried. I suddenly felt the enormity of the subject. I realized that, when you delve into a subject like this, there is no way that one filmmaker can capture the whole truth. I wanted this film to have emotional impact on my audience," she says, "but they have to see it only once. I have to see it over and over again. Like the women in my film, I had to alternate between making myself callous and allowing myself to be emotional."

Their Own Vietnam has been screened at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and elsewhere across the country. Kates herself is now working on the production crew of another film. "Working as part of a team is very different from being in charge of a film yourself," Kates notes. "When you have to plan the whole process yourself there's so much more that you have to worry about-things you never anticipate. But I'll do it again."

~ Thinh Nguyen

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