Main content

Far from Vietnam

If you are not affiliated with a college or university, and are interested in watching this film, please register as an individual and login to rent this film. Already registered? Login to rent this film. This film is also available on our home streaming platform, OVID.tv.

Initiated and edited by Chris Marker, FAR FROM VIETNAM is an epic 1967 collaboration between cinema greats Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch and Alain Resnais in protest of American military involvement in Vietnam--made, per Marker's narration, "to affirm, by the exercise of their craft, their solidarity with the Vietnamese people in struggle against aggression."

A truly collaborative effort, the film brings together an array of stylistically disparate contributions, none individually credited, under a unified editorial vision. The elements span documentary footage shot in North and South Vietnam and at anti-war demonstrations in the United States; a fictional vignette and a monologue that dramatize the self-interrogation of European intellectuals; interviews with Fidel Castro and Anne Morrison, widow of Norman Morrison, the Quaker pacifist who burned himself alive in front of the Pentagon in 1965; an historical overview of the conflict; reflections from French journalist Michele Ray; and a range of repurposed media material.

Passionately critical and self-critical, and as bold in form as it is in rhetoric, FAR FROM VIETNAM is a milestone in political documentary and in the French cinema.

Related Films

Do You Remember Vietnam?

Three years after the fall of Saigon, Pilger returns to Vietnam to examine…

Le Joli Mai

Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme's legendary portrait of Paris and Parisians…

Gene Boy Came Home

Eugene "Gene Boy" Benedict left the Odanak Indian Reserve at the age of…