One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor

After the end of the war in Vietnam in 1975, the phrase ‘boat people’ came to describe the Vietnamese refugees who fled the country seeking to escape political and ethnic persecution, as well as the dire economic conditions that had taken hold. The Vietnamese Canadian author and illustrator Thao Lam was one of around 1 million such refugees – though, being just two years old when her family fled, it’s hardly an experience she remembers. An animated adaptation of Lam’s children’s book The Paper Boat: A Refugee Story (2020), the short film Boat People describes the treacherous journey of Lam’s family out of Vietnam just as her mother often did – by using the example of the self-sacrificial lengths that ants will go to in order to save their colonies as both an allegory and a euphemism. With its meticulously constructed sound design and imagery, the acclaimed short ponders both the power and the limits of metaphor for understanding the world and ourselves.