Reception
An early cut of the film was screened in April 2005 in sold-out one-day-only showings in Little Saigon, Washington, D.C., and San Jose to commemorate the 30 year anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. The film was highly-praised by the Vietnamese diaspora as an accurate presentation of the experiences that many Vietnamese people had to go through. In the process of making the film, the director interviewed more than 400 former boat people, some of whom are cast in the film even though they are not professional actors.
In the opening weekend, it played in packed theaters, generating $87,442 on just four screens, giving the film the largest per theater average for that weekend ($21,861).
The film received mostly favorable reviews. In the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, it received an 92% "fresh" among all reviews and 100% among the "cream of the crop" and is currently in the Top 100(27th) Best Movies of 2007. Matt Zoller Seitz of The New York Times remarked that the director "achieves the impossible" and called it a "tearjerker". The Los Angeles Times called it a "superbly wrought saga of loss and survival" and "an example of sophisticated, impassioned filmmaking involving mainly people who lived through the harrowing experiences so unsparingly depicted". Bruce Newman of the San Jose Mercury News called it "heartbreaking" and gave it 4.5 out of 5 stars. Russell Edwards from Variety said it "deserves to be seen by a wider commercial audience" and is "frequently enthralling". New York magazine had a negative review of the film, saying that it has "several powerful sequences" but "never quite come alive". Bill White of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was even more critical, suggesting that "this Journey doesn't know where it's going", criticizing the "careless cinematography" and "clumsy stag".
Read more about this topic: Journey From The Fall
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