Helicopters on a maroon sky and images of war-torn My Lai haunted Boylston Hall last Saturday.

At the first in a series of screenings sponsored by the Harvard Vietnamese Association (HVA), the Vietnam war combat cameraman turned documentary filmmaker Tran Van Thuy spoke to an enthusiastic audience of two hundred that packed Fong Auditorium.

Highly controversial for their depictions of post-war Vietnam under the Communist regime, Thuy’s films have been met with vehement responses at universities nationwide and at film festivals such as the Festival du Reel in Paris and the Leipzig International Film Festival.

Thuy, among the generation of East Asian filmmakers personally marked by violent political upheaval of the 60’s and 70’s, says he is deeply concerned about the ethical role played by both film and filmmaker.

“I always tell my film students…the most important thing is to know one’s duty as a citizen,” Thuy says.

“The duty of the citizen is that when we have an idea we have to follow it—we can’t just leave it,” Thuy says. “I try to be as truthful as possible in the films…it’s not an easy thing to do.”

“The Sound of the Violin in My Lai,” one of the three films shown at the screening, testifies to the horror of history. The film was made in 1998 on the 30 year anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, when U.S. soldiers annihilated the rural village of My Lai in South Vietnam, killing hundreds of civilians.

The film juxtaposes gory images of the war, including photographs by both American and Vietnamese photographers—with the green pastures of My Lai today. The narrator, Mike Boehm, is an American who participated in the Vietnam War and returns thirty years later.

The film also describes the story of two American soldiers, Hugh Thompson and Larry Colburn. Unlike the other soldiers, the two stopped their helicopter amid the massacre and rescued several civilians.

Ironically, most of the images Thuy used for “The Sound of the Violin in My Lai” are from American, and not

Vietnamese, sources. Along with limited access to historical images, Thuy’s films suffer from low budget and poor equipment, like many other films made in Vietnam.

Thuy says he experiences government censorship regularly as a result of his critique of the Communist Party. His first film was banned in Vietnam from 1982-87. His second film “The Story of Kindness,” which was shown Saturday, was also banned upon release.

Only after the intervention of Communist Party leader Nguyen Van Linh was it released for public screening in the 1990s.

When asked about the future of Vietnamese film, Thuy remarks that it is “cloudy.”

“Your freedom is how you perceive it,” Thuy says.