Robertson says he was confined to a bamboo cage in the jungle by North Vietnamese captors and, accused of being a CIA spy, was tortured for a year. Confused and badly injured, he was released and married the Vietnamese nurse who helped care for him. He assumed the name of her dead husband. They had children. Jorgensen believes audiences in America, where “they don’t hold anything higher than service to the country,” will “lose their minds” when Unclaimed screens at the G.I. Film Festival in Washington, D.C., in May. “They’ll come unglued.” But Jorgensen wanted this Canadian production to screen in his home country first. The filmmaker came up against enough roadblocks from the military in the making of Unclaimed — especially when it came to contacting Robertson’s family — to be convinced that, as one high-placed government source told him, “It’s not that the Vietnamese won’t let him (Robertson) go; it’s that our government doesn’t want him.” Unclaimed follows the dramatic quest of Vietnam vet Tom Faunce to prove that the man he was told about while on a 2008 humanitarian mission in Southeast Asia was indeed an Army “brother” who had been listed as killed in action and subsequently forgotten. Faunce, a soft-spoken man who has suffered crushing loss and turmoil throughout his life, has devoted himself to helping the world’s most desperate people. He was determined to make good on his vow to leave no man behind after serving two years in a war that divided America and made him feel like a pariah when he finally came home. “Tom went to meet him (Robertson) and was very skeptical, grilled this guy up and down trying to get him to break, to say, ‘Oh, no, I’m just making it up.’ And he was adamant he was that guy,” said Jorgensen, who was in Toronto to help host an invitation-only patrons’ screening of Unclaimed at the Hot Docs Bloor Cinema two weeks ago and sat down for an exclusive interview with the Star. Robertson’s story seems unbelievable. And Jorgensen was equally skeptical when Faunce contacted him in 2012 about making a doc in the hope it would add muscle to his quest to reunite Robertson with his American family. Robertson was fingerprinted at a U.S. embassy in 2010. Faunce says he was later told, “There’s not enough proof to prove this is John Hartley Robertson. And I responded, ‘There’s not enough proof to prove he isn’t.’”
Posted on: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 20:33:30 +0000
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