Better Man (MA). Director: Khoa Do. Starring: Remy Hii, Bryan Brown, David Wenham. Two episodes, commences Thursday 25 July 8.30pm on SBS1
Van Nguyen's story looms large in the Australian consciousness. The execution of this young Australian citizen in 2005, after being found guilty of transporting heroin through Singapore en route from Cambodia to Australia, resonated in the hearts of many Australians. Particularly young Australians who were of an age with Van, and for whom there was a sense of injustice in the severity of the punishment compared with the scale of the crime, or who even questioned whether the death penalty was ever morally justified.
I was one such person, at the time just a year younger than Van, and myself no stranger to making bad choices for what seemed good reasons. I shared the hope and anxiety that attended the legal and grassroots attempts to gain Van's freedom, and the shock and grief when his death by hanging became reality. I can sympathise then with the sense of ownership many ordinary Australians might feel for Van's story. Emotionally, they were part of it. And I anticipated the SBS miniseries as a chance for us to collectively revisit and re-examine those events.
Of course, whatever ownership we might feel for this story, it does not compare with that of Van's family, his mother Kim and his twin brother Khoa. They have objected to the production and planned broadcast of the two part miniseries — due to commence tonight — on emotional grounds. 'She is traumatised. This has opened up old wounds,' Kim's local MP, Member for Chisholm, Anna Burke, has said on Kim's behalf. It is impossible not to sympathise with Kim's objections. Which mother would want public property made of her private grief?
I have no doubt that exploitation is the furthest thing from the mind of series writer and director, Khoa Do. A spokesperson for SBS told Fairfax 'Do felt it was an important Australian story to tell, particularly in the context of ongoing international debate about capital punishment laws'. Do perhaps more than any other established Australian filmmaker has the track record and moral authority to tell such a story without being accused of exploitation. As a filmmaker he tends to prioritise compassion and strong social messages, sometimes to a fault.
In his first film, The Finished People, the decision to enlist real life homeless people to re-enact versions of their