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“Nothing is more precious than freedom.” Ho Chi Minh’s hypocritical quote adorns the entrance to a re-education center (in other words, a slave-labor camp) in Ham Tran’s small-scale historical epic. But the film changes course halfway through and loses a lot of momentum. The haunting, gut-wrenching first half plunges us into a Vietnamese family’s nightmare experiences with Communist oppression in the years after the fall of Saigon, cross-cutting between a father’s degradation and torture in the above-mentioned camp and his family’s attempts to flee the country. While the second half–about the family’s adjustment to life in America–is reasonably good drama, it feels anticlimactic after the harrowing and unforgettable beginning.