Abstract:

"Vietnam: An American Journey begins in largely rebuilt Hanoi, travels down Highway One, stops in Vinh and Quangtri, which were all but leveled, to My Lai, to Danang with its War Crimes museum in the former U.S. Consulate building, and on to Ho Chi Minh City. Side trips to a UN refugee camp for Cambodians who fled to Vietnam to escape Pol Pot, and exclusive interviews with government officials and ordinary Vietnamese also are part of this historic film. Wartime action is intercut with today's Vietnam. Many locations had never been filmed before: Human rehabilitation - a Center for the Redignification of Women who had been wartime prostitutes, a center to treat drug addicts, an orphanage with U.S.-Vietnamese children, a physical rehabilitation center for patients who lost limbs from post-war land mine detonations; Physical rehabilitation - a Swedish pulp mill project, a French-sponsored bicycle factory, a UN project to rebuild the war-damaged palace at Hue, etc.; Cultural events - dramatic opera, humorous circus performers, patriotic ballet, solo musicians, visits to the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, a War Crimes museum; Work - in factories, markets and rice paddies. My Lai - The film's emotional peak is a woman at the site of the massacre who tearfully describes the tragedy and how she managed to be one of the few survivors. She was unknown in the U.S. before this film's release in 1979. A real portrait of a nation we can never forget."