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.