About two-thirds of the way through the documentary Daughter From Danang, there comes a moment so excruciating that viewers will either marvel at the luck of documentarians Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco, or curse them for not shutting off their cameras. The movie's subject, Heidi Bub, returns to her birth country of Vietnam, from where she was adopted as part of the U.S.-sponsored Operation Babylift toward the end of the Vietnam War. Bub spends a few days getting reacquainted with the relatives she barely knew when she was sent to live with her adopted mother (an upper-middle-class, sometimes cruel single woman) in Pulaski, Tennessee. But Bub finds her new environment thoroughly alien, and her anxiety peaks when she attends a family meeting set up to ask her for money. The hurt and confusion is so strong that Bub flees the room in tears, in a scene bound to resonate with anyone who's ever felt trapped by blood obligations—even commitments as benign as having to visit a particularly dull aunt. Bub's circumstances are more extreme, but the incredible force of Daughter From Danang derives from its natural, common progression from warm to suffocating. Shot on video and edited to a tight 75 minutes, the documentary starts with a concise history and critique of Operation Babylift (accused by several interviewees of frightening Vietnamese mothers of mixed-race babies into giving up their kids, and of lying to would-be American adoptive parents about the origins of their "orphans"), and then introduces Bub, who grew up as a sweet, big-haired, slightly emotionally damaged Southern belle. Now married with a child of her own, she gets in touch with an organization dedicated to bringing closure to Babyliftees who desire it, but no matter how much she's warned about the cultural differences between Tennessee and rural Vietnam, Bub is unprepared for the squalor, or for the demands on her attention. Daughter From Danang is hardly unsympathetic to Bub's birth mother Mai Thi Kim, or to her extended family. Their happiness at seeing their lost relative again is real, as is their financial need and their belief in the tradition of generation-to-generation assistance. What makes this story harrowing is that both parties are following the right path as they know it, and their mutual pain comes from irreconcilable national differences, exacerbated by war. Faced with an impossible situation, in foreign policy or at home, the temptation for Bub is to revert to the American way: to be generous far short of the point of real sacrifice, and to maintain optimism by shutting out real misery. Daughter From Danang is devastating in part because it's so chillingly familiar.