VIETNAM: PICKING UP THE PIECES (TV)
Summary
This documentary film follows director Jon Alpert as he becomes the first American filmmaker to return to Vietnam following the fall of Saigon, which occurred over two and a half years earlier. Alpert introduces the film from downtown Saigon, which he explains has been renamed "Ho Chi Minh City." "But everybody still calls it Saigon," he states. The filmmaker then conducts interviews with a number of the local citizens, all of whom have been seriously affected by the war in one way or another. The first place Alpert visits is the Center for Women's Dignity, where former prostitutes who serviced American military men are rehabilitated. Alpert speaks to a fourteen-year-old girl who became a prostitute at the age of ten and now makes straw mats for a living. Alpert then visits District Four, which he calls the "biggest slum in the whole city." People in the area have built their houses on stilts over flowing raw sewage, and Alpert speaks to one family whose members cram fourteen relatives into a tiny house. The government is trying to help these families by providing them with small plots of land outside of the city, Alpert tells viewers, where they can harvest crops to sell back to the government. "For years," he explains, "the main industry in Vietnam was the war, bringing in $5,000,000 dollars a day." Alpert then speaks with a number of recovering heroin and opium addicts as they attempt to quit, cold turkey, in a darkened shack. There are reported to be nearly half a million heroin addicts in Vietnam, but there are facilities to accommodate only 2,000 of them. Alpert visits a reeducation camp in which teachers make all their pupils memorize communist battle songs, as well as an army museum that celebrates the Vietnamese victory over the United States. As Alpert is talking with a doctor who worked at a medical school that was accidentally bombed by the United States, the man turns to the camera and says, "Deep in my heart I hate the Americans."
(This program contains technical problems. This represents the best copy of this program currently available to the Museum.)
Cataloging of this program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 2001/2002.
Preservation of the Post–World War II American Television Documentary Collection is supported in part by a Federal Save America’s Treasures grant administered by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Details
- NETWORK: PBS WNET New York, NY
- DATE: April 11, 1978 8:00 PM
- RUNNING TIME: 0:59:12
- COLOR/B&W: Color
- CATALOG ID: T:37887
- GENRE: Public affairs/Documentaries
- SUBJECT HEADING: Vietnam - Economic conditions; Vietnam - Social life and conditions; Vietnam War
- SERIES RUN: PBS - TV, 1978
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- David Loxton … Executive Producer
- Carol Brandenburg … Coordinating Producer
- Jon Alpert … Producer, Director
- Keiko Tsuno … Producer