The documentary film, WITNESSES TO A SECRET WAR, will be screened at the Visual Arts Theater in New York on Tuesday, June 2, 2009 at 7 p.m.  A question and answer session with director Deborah Dickson, co-producer Mary Robertson, editor Sakae Ishikawa and myself will follow.

Here’s the trailer for the film:

The film tells the story of America’s clandestine fight against communism that was being conducted in neighboring Laos while the war in neighboring Vietnam was being fought in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  At the time, Washington feared that if Laos fell to the Communists, the rest of Southeast Asia would follow, like a row of tumbling dominoes.  So the Central Intelligence Agency was dispatched to make a stand by recruiting a little-known group of tribesman to fight a proxy war.

WITNESSES TO A SECRET WAR, tells the history of America’s secret war in Laos through first hand accounts by some of the Hmong soldiers and their families who fought alongside the CIA operatives, survived, and were forced to flee when the Communists took over the country in 1975.  Tens of thousands of Hmong escaped Laos by crossing the Mekong River to neighboring Thailand and ended up in sprawling refugee camps.  Some left the camps to start a new life in America early on while others languished for decades.

Cy Thao and KaYing Yang were young children when they fled Laos with their families and were among the first to immigrate to the US.  Both have become successful Americans, but like exiles everywhere, they feel compelled to understand the past.  Cy is a Minnesota State Representative and a painter who uses his art to tell the little known story of his people.  KaYing is a refugee advocate working in Thailand to help a final group of Hmong refugees immigrate to the United States, including the Xiong family, who has been living in Thailand for the past 30 years.

As the journeys of Cy, KaYing, and the Xiong family unfold, other witnesses act as a Greek chorus, telling the story of this relatively unknown piece of American history—a story of betrayal, loss, and survival.

- Scott