The accents on the voiceovers say it all. We hear southern English, Australian, American and Hebridean. One thing links them: these are the grownup voices of the orphans who were flown out of South Vietnam as part of “operation babylift” at the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. Placed with families of various cultures around the world, they grew up with no experience of the country they had left behind.
One of them was Barton C Williams who was raised in the sun-and-surf traditions of Adelaide. Living in a majority white country, he suffered racist abuse – he performs a whole song full of insults – but knows no Vietnamese nor how to cook South Asian food. In 2021, his work as an actor took him to the set of Silent Roar, a film about a grieving surfer, on location on the Isle of Lewis. There, he met Andy Yearley, the “island’s best music teacher,” and part of the same Vietnamese diaspora. [READ MORE]