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What in the World
The latest five minute news bulletin from BBC World Service.
Imagine discovering that your quiet Vietnamese dad has a crazy backstory he never told you about. What do you do? Well, if you're Ashley Duong, you make a film about his life – with not just him, but your extended family all giving directors' notes from the sidelines.
Ashley grew up in Calgary knowing very little about her overprotective parents except that they were both refugees from Vietnam and that her father named her Da-Lê, after his home village. When Ashley got involved in student protests her concerned father Anh began writing her emails about his own experiences. She was amazed to hear he was shot at in Vietnam, witnessed the hostage crisis in Iran, and met the first man on the moon. She joked he was like an Asian Forrest Gump. Ashley was so astounded that she helped him write a memoir – called Dear Da-Lê – and then turned it into a film, called Ba’s Book. Filming in her dad's village in central Vietnam, she cast younger members of her family to act out scenes from his memoir while the rest of the family watched and commented from the sidelines. It was a collaboration that brought them all closer together. Anh and Ashley came into the Outlook studio when the film was showing at the London Film Festival.
On November 2nd 2026, a British man called Karl Bushby turned up at his mother’s house in Hull, in the north of England. He’d been away for 28 years on an epic and record-breaking mission. He covered more than 30,000 miles (50,000km) from the southernmost tip of South America, across 29 countries and four continents, even swimming across the English Channel to be reunited with his mother. Outlook's Danny Aeberhard caught up with him on the home stretch.
Presenter: Jo Fidgen
Producers: Vibeke Venema and Zoe Gelber
Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com or WhatsApp +44 330 678 2707
(Photo: Ashley and her father Anh stand, smiling, either side of a road marker that says 99km to D Nang. They are wearing trousers and Ashley wears an orange crochet top and a white cap. Behind them a woman in a traditional straw hat and trouser suit is watching, curious. Credit: Hieu To)