The Boat People -Happy Landfall? Five years ago Harold Williamson reported the plight of the Vietnamese
Boat People on a barren island in the South China Sea where 40,000 of them asked the world for mercy.
In this new film he sets out to discover what happened to some of those refugees, traced through a worldwide network of Vietnamese contacts - in New Orleans Tampa, Brussels and London.
All with different stories to tell of how they fared on alien shores, of what happened when their dream of freedom and hope of prosperity were put to the test. In Britain more than 80 per cent of the 16,000 Vietnamese are without work after a settlement policy of dispersal left them isolated and lonely. Did we do our best?
(Refugee Thérèse-Marie Nguyen now has her own bakery shop in Brussels)
Producer CLEM VALLANCE
Series editor ANTHONY ISAACS