Education About Asia: Online Archives

Kim’s Story: The Road from Vietnam

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DIRECTED BY SHELLY SAYWELL

NEW YORK: FIRST RUN/ICARUS FILMS

153 WAVERLY PLACE

NEW YORK, NY 10014

212-727-1711

48 MINUTES

Kim’s Story: The Road from Vietnam is a moving exploration of the human cost of war. It is sufficiently free of cant and broad enough in focus to be of use in a variety of classroom settings, though it will prove most useful for courses at the secondary level and above that address the Second Indochina War or examine the relationship between women and war. The film opens with a graphic documentation of an air strike on a village in Vietnam west of Saigon in 1972. The montage resolves into an image of a nine year-old girl emerging from the flames that have already consumed other members of her family. She is running down a road, crying. Napalm has burnt off her clothes and much of her flesh. The girl is Kim Phuc, and a still photograph taken of her that day won combat photographer Nick Ut a Pulitzer Prize.