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| During the war in Vietnam, thousands of people in the Vietnamese province of Cu Chi lived in an elaborate system of underground tunnels. Originally built in the time of the French, the tunnels were enlarged during the American presence. When the Americans began bombing the villages of Cu Chi, the survivors went underground where they remained for the duration of the war. The secret tunnels, which joined village to village and often pass beneath American bases, were not only fortifications for Viet Cong guerillas, but were also the center of community life. Hidden beneath the destroyed villages were hospitals where children were born and surgery was performed on causalities of war; underground were schools and public spaces where couples were married and private places where lovers met. There were even theatres where performers entertained with song and dance and traditional stories. | |||||
| The Cu Chi Tunnels is the story of life underground told by the people who lived the experience. It is a story told by a surgeon, an artist, an actress, an engineer; and the few survivors of the guerilla band who left the tunnels each night to fight against an enemy of vastly superior strength. |
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| Attached to the guerilla bands were Viet Cong documentary cameramen and camerawomen whose footage of the war from the Vietnamese point of view and of love, life and death in the tunnels has survived and is used in the film. This extremely rare footage provides a fascinating kind of echo; we see and hear an actress perform in the wartime tunnels and then we hear her describe the experience nearly thirty years later. | |||||
| Without exception, films and stories about the war in Vietnam have been told from a point of view other than that of the Vietnamese. In The Cu Chi Tunnels, the producers have allowed the Vietnamese to tell their own story. The sound track is in the Vietnamese language with English subtitles. In order to avoid political bias, the translations of the interviews were checked by scholars in both Ho Chi Minh City and by scholars living in America. | |||||
| The Cu Chi Tunnels is a disquieting film to watch. It is not easy to watch old guerillas bragging about the number of Americans they killed. But when those guerillas begin to talk of their fear of the "deep eyed" people with their magic weapons and about the girls they loved and about how the darkness was like an endless night and about how they felt the need to create something beautiful in order to balance the horror of war – then our former enemy becomes very human. The film becomes a film not about killing and darkness, but about light and life and the power of the human spirit. When we think of our enemies as monsters or as an abstraction, confrontation with their humanity is a deeply troubling experience. But, somehow, as in the film The Cu Chi Tunnels, it also becomes a healing experience. | |||||
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