Director Thanh Tan explains how her experience as a child of refugees led her to help those displaced after the fall of Kabul and make a Crosscut docu-series about their plight. 

When Thanh Tan learned that the United States military had withdrawn from Afghanistan and left the capital, Kabul, in the hands of the Taliban, she felt she needed to do something.  

She saw striking similarities between the plight of Afghans fleeing their country in the wake of the withdrawal and the plight of her parents and others who had fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

One way she responded was to create a mutual aid project to help Afghan refugees arriving in Washington to find housing and other resources. Another was to pick up her video camera. 

For this episode of the Crosscut Reports podcast, host Sara Bernard talks with Tan about her new Crosscut docu-series Refuge After War, which draws on her personal experience to explore the parallels between the two refugee experiences, and tells how she believes we can prevent repeating the difficult history her family experienced.

Watch Refuge After War here. 

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Credits

Host/Producer: Sara Bernard

Reporter: Thanh Tan

Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten

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