Starting Place
(Point de départ)

Robert Kramer returns to Vietnam, twenty-three years after People’s War shot in 1969. Uncertain of the existence of time, he investigates the Vietnam of today by linking up again with yesterday’s characters, filming the figures of a people full of life and conversing with himself at the rhythm of the universal “self”. A point of departure, inasmuch as his anti-war engagement is what brings him into being: as a filmmaker, as an activist, as a human being. An anamnestic film where the past looks at the present and the present looks at the past. Kramer questions both himself and Vietnam, and here it is a single weft in chiaroscuro of what remains of the war or of the greatness of the Vietnamese people of yesterday. This greatness dazzles and deals sometimes violent blows through its memories and figures, including that of Linda Evans, an American militant sentenced to forty years in prison for her political activism. Catherine Hass