Point de départ (Starting Place)
Robert Kramer, FR/VN 1994Screenplay, Cinematography: Robert Kramer; Editing: Christine Benoît, Robert Kramer, Marie-Hélène Mora. DCP, color, 80 min. French/English/Vietnamese with English subtitles
Preceded by: Say Kom Sa
Robert Kramer; Editing: Robert Kramer, Julien Cloquet. FR, 1998, DCP, color, 20 min. French/Vietnamese with English subtitles
After the Newsreel partisan film People's War (1969), the Vietnam chapter was still not over for Kramer. He returned there in 1992 to see what had become of the country and its people, of the euphoria, the struggle and the solidarity, after almost 25 years. The result is a series of reunions in which the traces of the war are omnipresent: the amputated leg of a ballet dancer, personal memories of the merciless attacks carried out by the United States, a museum commemorating the war. A kind of counter-shot is provided by a conversation with imprisoned Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) comrade Linda Evans shot in close-up. She went to Vietnam in 1969, later joined the militant Weather Underground group and was sentenced to forty years in prison in 1987. The title of Say Kom Sa refers to "c'est comme ça" spoken with an American accent. Quiet observations of Hanoi at a time when the country is opening up to the West (and thus to tourism), which is reflected in the many building sites. (V.P.)
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