Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form."
-Jean Luc Godard
FRESH
off the
PRESS
November 28, 2022
The December/January national issue of "AARP-The Magazine" features an article about the inspiration and humble beginnings of the SEA2C Foundation. You can click on the link below to view it.
A huge THANK YOU to Andrea Atkins Hessekiel at AARP for covering this and to Rachel Gregg Galvez for pulling everything together! This is another big step in our mission to change the world one life at a time!
2022
November 25, 2023 - INTERSECTIONS is selected as a winner for the Cannes World Film Festival. The final judging for the Cannes World Film Festival concluded and INTERSECTIONS was selected as the WINNER for the category of "Best Inspirational Film". INTERSECTIONS also finished as a Finalist for the categories of "Best Documentary Feature Film" and "Best Director - Documentary Feature Film". We are so honored that the stories shared through the INTERSECTIONS Documentary Film Series will allow the voices of the Vietnam War era adoptees, Amerasians, and Veterans to be heard around the world. We are so humbled to have the opportunity to share these stories as a part of our mission to change the world one life at a time!
Intersections is also an "Official Selection" for the Docs Without Borders International Film festival and judging is still in progress.
November 17, 2022 - The INTERSECTIONS Documentary series has advanced to "Finalist" in the Cannes World Film Festival in the categories of "Best Documentary Feature" and "Best Inspirational Story". INTERSECTIONS is now in consideration as a potential Nominee or Winner. Judging is still in progress with results expected to be released in the next few weeks and months.
INTERSECTIONS is an award winning multi-season docuseries that explores the lives of the "Children of the Dust"; a derogatory Vietnamese term to refer to the mixed-race children (known as Amerasians) born in Vietnam during the war. In many cases, they were orphaned and adopted into families around the world and now their journeys are intersecting with the unexpected gift of touching lives across multiple generations as a they turn the tide on the stigmas attached to the Vietnam War. The series also shares the stories of the men, women, and military service members that helped shape their lives. These are their stories... in their own words.
INTERSECTIONS is currently produced in house as a part of the Multimedia Influence and Education Program of SEA2C. This program is is operated by a volunteer force of multiple award winning film makers, photojournalist, and multimedia professionals with storied backgrounds in cinematography and journalism.
The series is Directed by Vietnam War Amerasian adoptee, Trần Văn Kirk (Kellerhals), and is hosted and narrated by Vietnam War Amerasian adoptee, Canh Oxelson.
November 7, 2022
"INTERSECTIONS" Selected to be in the 2022 CANNES World Film Festival
We are honored to announce that INTERSECTIONS has been selected to be a part of the Cannes World Film Festival! The Cannes Film Festival judging team is currently reviewing all selected films. The Semi-Finalists, Finalists, Nominees and ultimately the Winners will be announced shortly.
In Season 1 of INTERSECTIONS, we meet Canh, Rachel, Dan and Kirk; 4 Vietnam War era adoptees that resided in the Sacred Heart Orphanage in Da Nang, Vietnam during the tail end of the war. They were adopted separately into families in the United States, lived very separate lives, yet miraculously their journeys intersected after nearly 50 years and they are finding purpose, passion, and connections that have changed the trajectory of each of their lives.
INTERSECTIONS is an award winning multi-season docuseries that explores the lives of the "Children of the Dust"; a derogatory Vietnamese term to refer to the mixed-race children (known as Amerasians) born in Vietnam during the war. In many cases, they were orphaned and adopted into families around the world and now their journeys are intersecting with the unexpected gift of touching lives across multiple generations as a they turn the tide on the stigmas attached to the Vietnam War. The series also shares the stories of the men, women, and military service members that helped shape their lives. These are their stories... in their own words.
INTERSECTIONS is currently produced in house as a part of the Multimedia Influence and Education Program of SEA2C. This program is is operated by a volunteer force of multiple award winning film makers, photojournalist, and multimedia professionals with storied backgrounds in cinematography and journalism.
The series is Directed by Vietnam War Amerasian adoptee, Trần Văn Kirk (Kellerhals), and is hosted and narrated by Vietnam War Amerasian adoptee, Canh Oxelson.
#CannesWorldFilmFestival #SEA2C #Intersections
INTERSECTIONS wins an award for "Excellence" at the Docs Without Borders
International Film Festival
February 19, 2023 - Norfolk, VA The Documentary Film Series, "Intersections" was selected by a film jury for the award of "Excellence" in the 2023 Documentaries Without Borders International Film Festival.
INTERSECTIONS is an award winning multi-season docuseries that explores the lives of the "Children of the Dust"; a derogatory Vietnamese term to refer to the mixed-race children (known as Amerasians) born in Vietnam during the war. In many cases, they were orphaned and adopted into families around the world and now their journeys are intersecting with the unexpected gift of touching lives across multiple generations as a they turn the tide on the stigmas attached to the Vietnam War. The series also shares the stories of the men, women, and military service members that helped shape their lives. These are their stories... in their own words.
INTERSECTIONS is currently produced in house as a part of the Multimedia Influence and Education Program of SEA2C. This program is is operated by a volunteer force of multiple award winning film makers, photojournalist, and multimedia professionals with storied backgrounds in cinematography and journalism.
The series is Directed by Vietnam War Amerasian adoptee,Trần Văn Kirk (Kellerhals), and is hosted and narrated by Vietnam War Amerasian adoptee, Canh Oxelson.
March 4, 2023 - Norfolk, Virginia
We are honored to announce that Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is joining the "Intersections" Documentary Film Series Production Team as an Executive Producer and Script Advisor.
Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is bringing her many years of experience in film consulting to the project. She is the internationally best-selling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child. Her writing has been translated into twenty languages and has won many prestigious awards including the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the 2021 International Book Awards, the 2021 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for "contribution to peace and reconcilation". Born and grew up in Vietnam and fluent in Vietnamese and English, Dr. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai will help ensure that elements of Vietnamese culture, society and history are appropriately represented in "Intersections". Experienced in Amerasian issues through her many years of research and journalistic work related to her novel, Dust Child, which comprehensively documents the experiences of Amerasians left behind in Vietnam as well as their parents, Quế Mai will bring valuable insights into the project.
Born and raised in Vietnam, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the author of the international bestseller The Mountains Sing, runner-up for the 2021 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the 2020 BookBrowse Best Debut Award, the 2021 International Book Awards, the 2021 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the 2020 Lannan Literary Award Fellowship for Fiction. She has published twelve books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in Vietnamese and English and has received some of the top literary prizes in Việt Nam. Her writing has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in major publications, including the New York Times. She has a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University. She is an advocate for the rights of disadvantaged groups in Việt Nam and was named by Forbes Vietnam as one of twenty inspiring women of 2021. Dust Child is her second novel. For more information, visit: www.nguyenphanquemai.com.
March 31, 2023 - "Moving Forward After Vietnam"
Published in USA Today | The Indy Star on March 26, 2023 - By John Tuohy
For five decades, Kirk Kellerhals assumed his parents were killed in the Vietnam War. He spent his life trying to figure out who they were and how they died. Then in 2017, he discovered they were alive and well in America. “Now I was going to meet them,” Kellerhals remembered.
Kellerhals was one of thousands of children of U.S. service members placed in Vietnamese orphanages during the war. In 1969, his mother, Thuy-Nga Thi Niblett, was forced by her father and brother to put him in Danang’s Sacred Heart orphanage be- cause he was the son of an American. His father, Air Force veteran Sheldon Soule, re- turned to the states before he knew Niblett was pregnant. Two years later, a U.S. Army major adopted Kellerhals and brought him to the United States, raising the boy at various military bases around the world. Niblett emigrated from Vietnam that same year and began a decades-long search for her son and his father.
There is no reliable estimate of how many Amerasians were put up for adoption, but about 23,000 people born in Vietnam now live in the United States. In 1975, a U.S. pro- gram called Operation Babylift brought 2,000 Amerasians to the states, but not be- fore the first flight crashed, killing 144 children. His new family told Kellerhals he was adopted. They assumed his natural parents were dead.
Over the years, he grew curious about his heritage, partly because of bullying from other children and, later, discrimination by adults. “I looked different, dark-skinned, so I was picked on because I had a father who was of German descent and a mother who was part Irish,” Kellerhals said. “I was called Bruce Lee, Charlie Chan, you name it.” Eventually, he learned how to neutralize the harassment. He lied about his heritage. Whatever was convenient or cool. He was Latino for a while. Italian. Hawaiian. Though he knew he was part Vietnamese, he was reluctant to identify himself as such, even after becoming a police officer in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He was ashamed of the way Vietnamese women were portrayed as prostitutes and U.S. soldiers as irresponsible.
His wife, whom he met in South Korea, convinced him six years ago to accept his ancestry and to learn more through DNA testing. Thirty days later, he was at his son’s high school graduation in Henderson, Tennessee, when he received an email from someone named Nga. She said she was his biological mother. He was suspicious. Two minutes later, the DNA search outfit also sent an email. “Congratulations: You have a parent/child match.” Kellerhals called his mother that day. The next month, she traveled from Texas to meet him in Virginia. Shortly afterward, they connected with Soule, who was of English and Scandinavian descent, in Syracuse, New York. Suddenly, Kellerhals transformed from an adopted orphan with no living birth parents into a middle-aged man with two parents and several siblings on both sides. “There was an immediate bond, like I’d known them my whole life,” said Kellerhals, who is now a photojournalist. “The odds of thinking both had died to finding both birth parents was a blessing.” Soule died in March 2022 at the age of 69. Kellerhals has since founded an organization, Sea2C, with two other adoptees from Sacred Heart to tell the stories of children from the war and help them prepare for what to expect if they attempt to reunite with lost family members."
March 23, 2023 Veteran’s Encounter With Vietnamese American Adoptees Eases Pain After 50 Years
For one Marine, inspirational stories of the rescued eclipse haunting thoughts of wounded children
By- Andrea Atkins, AARP Veteran Reporter
Roger Boyd, circa 1969 - 1970, at base Marble Mountain in Vietnam. Courtesy Roger Boyd
For more than half a century, Roger Boyd, a Marine helicopter gunner and crew chief who flew 720 missions in Vietnam, was haunted by memories of war.
In particular, Boyd could never forget his experience of having to step on wounded children he had rescued and hold a crowd of desperate families at bay by pointing his rifle at them.
All that changed at a reunion in Hilton Head, South Carolina, in 2021. Boyd, now 73, laughed and joked with fellow Marines — all of them grayer than he remembered, as was he. But it was the three non-veterans in attendance who helped relieve what he had struggled with for more than 50 years.
The trio were Vietnamese American babies — adults now — who had been adopted by American families in the 1970s and who had gone to the reunion to thank the veterans for helping save their lives.
Seeing them took Boyd back to an incident near An Hoa, southwest of Da Nang, in 1970. Boyd was returning from a mission when his CH-46 helicopter was diverted to pick up victims from a school bus that had been bombed by the enemy. The helicopter landed on Highway One, where he found scores of children injured, bleeding and maimed.
“It was ungodly,” Boyd, who lives in Oelwein, Iowa, told AARP Veteran Report. “I remember thinking, What the hell am I doing here? I was a 19-year-old kid with no medical training. There was a language barrier. And there were all of these distraught parents, carrying all these bleeding little children.”
Boyd loaded as many as he could onto the CH-46, but there was no way he could help all of them. “They were two-deep,” he said. “I simply couldn’t take any more.”
Parents were screaming and begging him to help. They were unaware another helicopter was on its way, and he didn’t know how to tell them. The roar of the engines made communication even more challenging.
“We had to take off so that another aircraft could land,” he said. The clamoring families were hampering the rescue. Boyd picked up his rifle and pointed it at them, using it to push away others who were trying to climb aboard.
Then, to get to his crew chief seat behind the cockpit, he had to walk over the wounded children. “I had to step on humans,” he said, the shock of it still in his voice. “I’ve never erased that image.”
Boyd, who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his courage under fire during a separate mission, never knew what happened to the children he delivered to a hospital that day. Trying to find out prompted him to travel to Vietnam in 2019. But no one seemed to know anything about the incident.
Meeting the adoptees two years after the trip helped provide a measure of the closure he had sought. They are Kirk Kellerhals and Rachel Galvez, co-founders of the SEA2C Foundation, and Daniel Brown.
All three of them are the offspring of American fathers who had fought in the war and Vietnamese mothers. Many such children were adopted by American families, the majority as part of Operation Babylift after the final U.S. withdrawal in 1975.
The foundation’s primary mission is to support Vietnamese American adoptees, including assistance with finding birth families.
Boyd’s encounter with the trio filled him with joy and fueled his hope that some of the children on his helicopter, and those he had been forced to leave behind that horrific day in 1970, had grown up to have good lives too.
“I was so struck by what good, impressive people they turned out to be. I was proud of them,” he said. “They’re just incredible.”
Boyd has kept in touch with the adoptees, a healing connection across generations and between the U.S. and Vietnam. “It was just so memorable — and so good,” he said.
To learn more about the work of the SEA2C Foundation, visit https://www.sea2c.org/.
May 24, 2023 - New York City, New York
INTERSECTIONS Receives a Silver Telly Award from the 44th Annual Telly Awards
We are proud and honored to announce that the pilot episode for season 1 of the Intersections Docuseries , “Chapter 1-Meet the Đà Nẵng Gang” was just selected for the Silver Telly Award for the 44th Annual Telly Awards in the category of Long Format Documentary. We are humbled that these stories are being recognized for the inspirational and healing values that we established as the true benchmarks for the project’s success.