Educational Media Reviews Online

This film gives a good current assessment of the state of cultural survival of the Hmong people. Filmmaker Holmquist met Lao-Tong, then the leader of the Hmong people of Maetho, Laos in 1969 while filming the Hmong and their cultivation of opium, their chief cash crop. Though no longer their leader when Holmquist returned to Maetho in 1999, Lao-Tong remained an honored elder of the group and was credited with moving the Maetho Hmong from habitual use of and economic dependence on opium, to the growing and selling of flowers and vegetables in the Laotian markets.

Though the Hmong have inhabited the “Golden Triangle” area of Thailand, Laos, and Burma for several thousand years, they continue to be discriminated against by other ethnic cultures in the area. Essentially, the Hmong are a permanent underclass in the area they inhabit, nomads in their own countries easily displaced from their mountain villages as politics, war, or overcrowding make their lands strategically or economically desirable. In Laos and Thailand, for example, the Hmong do not have the legal right to own property.

Naturally, the traditional Hmong culture is in crisis. Lao-Tong’s group may have found an alternative to opium farming, but few other Hmong groups have been allowed the freedom to survive outside the increasingly corrupt and dangerous role of suppliers to the opium trade, and many Hmong have not been able to break the opium habit. The Hmong have been forced to emigrate from their traditional lands in Southeast Asia in increasing numbers to survive social and economic repression. Again, Hmong culture is being severely challenged to even survive amongst the established cultures in their new lands, speaking new Western languages.

From Opium to Chrysanthemums tells the story of the Hmong in Thailand, Laos and the U.S., the challenges of breaking from the opium economy in Asia and the hopes of maintaining a survivable Hmong culture within the radically different social fabric of America. The film itself is technically excellent in all aspects, the cinematography simply outstanding. Highly recommended.