Khoa Do is giving the tide a face

Kim (Kathy Nguyen) and Hanh (Sheena Pham) in Mother Fish. Photo / Supplied

Vietnamese Australian film-maker Khoa Do may not have been born to make Mother Fish, but the seeds of the film were sown by the time he was 2.

The 31-year-old Sydneysider was only a baby when his family fled Vietnam in an overloaded, underpowered river boat. Like many of those collectively known as boat people, they ended up in a refugee camp in Malaysia before being accepted as migrants to Australia.

Do certainly made the most of the opportunity, studying law at university before becoming a film-maker. He shares his skills with underprivileged, particularly Vietnamese, kids in southwestern Sydney, where his work has earned him recognition, including being named Young Australian of the year in 2005.

The communities, in turn, have inspired his film-making: The Finished People (2003) was a no-budget verite piece about street kids; Footy Legends was a comedy drama about a league-mad migrant called Luc Vu.

In Mother Fish, which opened in Auckland on Thursday, he confronts the on-board reality of flight on an endless ocean.

Strikingly, the film is set, and shot, entirely in a sewing factory, the workplace of Kim (Hien Nguyen), a now-middle-aged seamstress and one-time boat refugee. A chance event jogs her memory of that ordeal which in a seamless transition, is re-enacted before her eyes as if in her imagination.

It sounds dire, like a secondary school improvisation assignment, but Do and his cast command our complete suspension of disbelief not just by their excellent craft but by the urgency and passion of the story they tell. Abetted by skilful camerawork and a first-rate sound design, they make something special out of the simplest of raw materials.

The film adapts a piece of community theatre, Do explains down a phone line from Sydney in an Aussie drawl as wide as the Nullarbor.

"It played two seasons in Parramatta, though it was different from the finished film because we actually built a boat and put it on stage."

Mother Fish's "boat", by contrast, is formed by the furniture of the sweatshop: sewing benches become gunwales, power leads become ropes, clothes racks become superstructure. And they seem to deteriorate before our eyes, corroded by salt water, shredded by wind.

Do says the idea for the film came to him during interviews he was doing with boat-trip survivors.

"One of them was this Vietnamese lady who had worked for years in Australia making clothes for Country Road and Kmart. And she told me that when she was at her workbench sewing, she would often re-live her boat trip, see it play out in front of her eyes. I thought, 'Wow. What if we made a film where, while she's in the factory, we went back on her trip with her - so the present merges with the past'."

The warm welcome accorded to the film in migrant communities makes it plain that it struck a chord, but Do hopes Mother Fish will also address some of the prejudices that are embedded in Australian political and public discourse.

"When I first started making the piece, it was when the communities were first starting to tell their stories. For a long time, we couldn't because it was so close and so raw. But also if you trawl through articles about boat arrivals, there are figures and dates and times and where the boat came from [but] they hardly ever mention anything about the actual people. They are just a faceless tide. I wanted to tell the stories of real people."

LOWDOWN

What: Mother Fish
Where: Academy Cinemas
On the web: www.motherfish.com.au; www.khoado.com.au


-TimeOut