Taggart Siegel and Jim McSilver spent seventeen years filming Paja Thao, a Hmong shaman who had carried his family from Laos through refugee camps to a new life in the American Midwest, and the resulting documentary, The Split Horn, aired on PBS in 2001 as part of the Independent Lens strand, co-produced with ITVS. Siegel first sought the Hmong out after reading an ethnographer's description of their shamanic culture, and stayed long enough to film across those same seventeen years of one family's history.
Paja's practice is ua neeb, the shamanic ritual through which he communicates with ancestral spirits on behalf of the sick and the troubled, learned and carried within a specific lineage rather than taught freely. The film centers his preparation for his first ua neeb performed on American soil, and the harder question behind it: whether that practice, and the family standing that comes with holding it, survives a generation of children raised mostly on the American side of two worlds.
That tension is the film's real subject, narrated in part by Paja's own teenage daughter, Chai, which gives an American audience a way into the family's life without a stranger's voice explaining it to them. PBS's own release made a Hmong-language audio track available too, so Hmong elders who do not read English subtitles could follow it.
What the film does not do, in either institution's own account, is set Paja's chant down as text a viewer could read or repeat. Ua neeb is transmitted shaman to shaman, not printed for an audience, and a documentary that shows a man performing it without publishing its words keeps exactly the distinction this record keeps too: a practice honestly witnessed without being handed to anyone unauthorized to carry it forward.