Like many Americans of his generation, the Vietnam War was a pivotal event in Robert Kramer’s intellectual development. In the mid-1960s, he published two political analysis articles and wrote an unproduced screenplay about the conflict, before traveling there in 1969 with other members of Newsreel to film People’s War, a medium-length documentary about the North Vietnamese struggle. Almost thirty years later, in 1998, he returned to the pacified country, now grappling with globalization, where he filmed a short video chronicle, Say Kom Sa. Between these two projects, Point of Departure, a documentary masterpiece in the style of floating framing and fragmented editing that Kramer has been developing since Our Nazi, bridges a national past that refuses to fade and a present without a future.

PEOPLE’S WAR : (NEWSREEL #43) (1969) 40’
POINT DE DÉPART (1993) 90’
SAY KOM SA (1998) 19’

DVD Interzone (Formats 35mm, 16mm, video), total duration 139 minutes.

Languages: french, english, vietnamese
subtitles: french, english, german, italian
Booklet of 52 pages