When The Beautiful Country, directed by Hans Petter Moland, begins, a title tells filmviewers that the Vietnamese term bui doi means “less than dust” and explains that Amerasians, who have been estimated to number at least 12,000, were despised after the Americans departed in 1975, acquiescing to the victory of North Vietnam over South Vietnam. The film takes place in 1990. Binh (played by Damien Nguyen) is living in a small hut with a distant relative in a village near Ha Long Bay. He has lost track of his Vietnamese mother, Mai (played by Chau Thi Kim Xuan), and he has never met his American father, though he clings to a photograph of all three when he was a baby. Soon, his relative’s daughter decides to marry, so there is no more room for him in the hut, so he bicycles hundreds of miles past Hanoi to see his mother in the city captioned as “Saigon.” (The filming is actually in Hanoi.) When he locates Mai, she is a servant in the opulent house of a party official, who drives a Mercedes; she begs to have her son work alongside her, and her request is granted. Mai also gives Binh a copy of her marriage certificate with his father from Houston, who suddenly disappeared one day. However, the party official and his wife are quite rude. When an accident occurs one day, with the wife injured on the floor, Binh and his mother flee, and she quickly arranges for him to take a boat, using $2,000 that she has saved from her second job as a prostitute. (As Binh learns later, he could have applied to fly to America by taking advantage of the Orderly Departure Program that existed in 1990 for Amerasians and other Vietnamese with relatives in the United States.) Mai also asks Binh to take along his infant half-brother, Tam (played by Tam Dang Quoc Thinh), whom she may know is not eligible for ODP. The boat trip is treacherous, but ultimately the survivors land safely in Malaysia (recalling the plot of the 1992 film The Killing Beach). He is interned on an island with other Vietnamese, including a prostitute, Ling (played by Bai Ling), who somehow arrived all the way from North China. Binh bonds with her, who in time uses her sexual attractiveness to secure passage for Binh on a ship captained by an Australian bound for America. The ship contains many illegals in steerage, runs into rough weather that ruins some of the food, and many die due to disease and the resulting reduction in rations by 50 percent. Finally, the ship lands in New York, and the illegals are employed in Chinatown, believing that they must work off debts for the portion of the overcharged price of passage that remains unpaid. One night, while gambling with fellow illegals, Binh confesses that he embarked on sea passage to find his father, an American. They laugh, teasing him that he could have flown over instead (utilizing the ODP). Realizing that he may be entitled to American citizenship, he leaves Chinatown and hitchhikes to Texas. Eventually, he finds his father, Steve (played by Nick Nolte), whom he learns was blinded by an explosion in Vietnam, as a result of which he was flown, while unconscious, to a military hospital in Maryland. Binh then begins to take care of his father. (Presumably, he can utilize ODP to fly his mother to join them.) Despite some anachronisms, the film is quite touching, providing elements in the lives of many Vietnamese refugees in the United States, and a happier picture of Amerasians than the 1999 film Bastards, though without the gorgeous cinematography of Three Seasons (1999), in which a former American soldier tracks down his daughter in Ho Chi Minh City. MH