Movies & Videos
Movies & Videos
Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam
This is not a documentary that maintains a specific stance either for or against the war, but simply features letters written by U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines during the war to their families and friends back home. Archive footage of the war and news coverage thereof, augment the first-person “narrative” by men and women who were in the war, some of whom did not survive it.
What is the psychology of war? Do soldiers become murderers when they enjoy killing? Is war beautiful? Are all humans capable of monstrous acts? First Kill examines these and other questions, as it explores what war does to the human mind and soul. Interviews with several Vietnam veterans evoke the contradictory feelings that killing produces – fear, hate, seduction and pleasure.
A startling and courageous film, Peter Davis’s landmark 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds unflinchingly confronted the United States’ involvement in Vietnam at the height of the controversy that surrounded it. Using a wealth of sources—from interviews to newsreels to footage of the conflict and the upheaval it occasioned on the home front—Davis constructs a powerfully affecting picture of the disastrous effects of war.
Vietnam: American Holocaust exposes one of the worst cases of sustained mass slaughter in history, carefully planned and executed by presidents of both parties. US dedicated generals and foot soldiers, knowingly or unknowingly, killed nearly 5 million people, on an almost unimaginable scale, mostly using incendiary bombs.
The incredible account of the break-up of the US military in Vietnam. John Pilger’s first film, The Quiet Mutiny, made in 1970 for the British current affairs series World in Action, broke the sensational story of insurrection by American drafted troops in Vietnam. In his classic history of war and journalism, The First Casualty, Phillip Knightley describes Pilger’s revelations as among the most important reporting from Vietnam. The soldiers’ revolt – including the killing of unpopular officers – marked the beginning of the end for the United States in Indo-China.
In February 1971, one month after the revelations of the My Lai massacre, an astonishing public inquiry into war crimes committed by American forces in Vietnam was held at a Howard Johnson motel in Detroit. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War organized this event called the Winter Soldier Investigation. More than 125 veterans spoke of atrocities they had witnessed and committed. Though the event was attended by press and television news crews, almost nothing was reported to the American public. Yet, this unprecedented forum marked a turning point in the anti-war movement.