Kim's Story

It can be argued that the 20th-century has largely described and defined itself less with words than with single images, moving and still. Among the most potent of these images have been the ones spewed out from the maw of war. For anyone living through the Vietnam era, the defining image of that war may well be the photograph of a group of terrified children, fleeing the unspeakable horror embodied in a hellish plume of ochre and black smoke in the background. In the forefront, a small, screaming girl, naked and with arms outstretched, her body flayed by napalm. Although the photo was to become burned into the popular imagination as a symbol of the nightmarish disasters of that particular war (winning photographer Nick Ut a Pulitzer Prize), few of us ever learned either the girl's name--Kim Phuc--or her fate. Kim's Story is an immensely moving recounting of that 9-year-old girl's tale, and a tribute to the remarkable, courageous woman she lived to become. Through the use of understated yet effective narrative and visuals, the video eloquently chronicles Kim's odyssey, from the fire-bombing of her village on June 8, 1972 by U.S.-commanded South Vietnamese air forces, to her long and painful physical rehabilitation in Saigon hospitals and subsequent forced enlistment by the North Vietnamese as a sort of anti-U.S. poster girl. The video follows her defection to Canada, her marriage, and the birth of her child. Perhaps the most remarkable insights into Kim's life, however, concern her almost beatific impulse to act as an agent for peace, forgiveness, and healing. Her speech at a Veteran's Day assembly at the Vietnam War Memorial, and her meeting with the captain who arranged the air strike on her village are as singularly unforgettable as the image snapped by Nick Ut in 1972. Highly recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (G. Handman)