Photo Courtesy Sundance Film Festival

Here are our stories of exile, all of America. But for the now small surviving tribes of Native American Indians, the country is one of immigrants, and their stories, so many untold, so often, despite differences of culture, are the same. What then is there in Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath's NERAKHOON (The Betrayal) to make it original, powerful and more than just the mere memory of every family once poor in America? While beautifully shot, its images lyrical but at times manipulatively romantic, NERAKHOON (The Betrayal) fails in all but one moment to render a sketch of human suffering and healing. It's a storybook, a gangster tale, a glimpse of a broken home, an ultimate return to faith, but through all of this, it's still not heartbreaking. It's still not as potent as the recollections of so many exiled families. It simply doesn't carry that weight.

More than two decades in the making, NERAKHOON (The Betrayal) opens on co-director Phrasavath's family. The CIA has enlisted Laos citizens into a covert operation to assist the defeat of communism. Among that group of men is Phrasavath's father who works to locate ideal bombing locations within the country. When America pulls out of Laos, however, imprinting with its departure both physical and emotional damage on the country's people, the Communist Pathet Lao take power and immediately pull into custody for 're-education' former American allies. Now separated from his father and struggling to live in the ravaged country with his mother and nine siblings, Phrasavath escapes to Thailand and awaits his family's arrival. A lovely sequence of Phrasavath's departure weaves stories from Laos culture into his own history, tying his spirit forever to the land he's forced to leave.

Arriving in Brooklyn, Phrasavath's family--two sisters abandoned along the way, left in Laos because of the circumstances of the family's hurried escape-- finds not a warm cultural embrace but a gritty vista of concrete jungle and a small apartment to share with a Cambodian family and a Vietnamese tenant. They thought they'd arrived in Africa, Phrasavath says. The poverty-stricken, predominantly Black-American neighborhood was not the vision they'd been sold of America.

A harsh cultural adjustment finds the children grappling with gangs and emotional dissociation. Phrasavath's mother quietly cries as her familial authority is diminished to a mere laughable commodity while Phrasavath himself finds his position increasingly that of the father figure. "I'm not your husband," he says to his mother at any early turn in the doc.

A chance reunion in the middle of the film provides temporary relief from the angst, and yet that too, like so much of NERAKHOON (The Betrayal), falls away just as it appears hopeful. It's here that Kuras and Phrasavath work best in storytelling. Viewing on a micro-scale the way in which political decisions trickle down to the people, the two unravel the conundrum of a family torn apart, Phrasavath sitting down, his phone held to his ear, his eyes now full of tears. There's a tangible beauty in the desperation of this moment. This is the inkling of the exile story that resonates for generations.

As the film's stream of consciousness flows into a close, the wrap-up is almost a bit too neat, the story too circular. It's an ending that dreams itself closure. Whether that closure can ever really occur is a different matter altogether.