Kramer, Fruchter, and Douglas were among the first Americans to film inside North Vietnam and had their footage confiscated by the State Department for their trouble. The footage was finally released after government dubbing, then edited by Newsreel to become one of the most-screened films of the antiwar movement. The People's War shows the abundant evidence of massive American bombing in Vietnam, but also the daily lives in factories and farms of people determined to defeat the U.S. Unlike many of the antiwar films prior to 1969, The People's War openly praises the heroic struggle of the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front, and as a result prompted heated controversy in many liberal peace groups.-Thomas Brom (40 mins, B&W, 16mm, From MoMA)Starting Place Robert Kramer (France, 1993) (Point de départ). "Vietnam is still a mirror," Kramer said. "Despite ourselves, it has always reflected us back at ourselves." Twenty-three years after his first trip to North Vietnam, Kramer returned. Starting Place is an attempt to link an unalterable past with an irrefutable present. In Hanoi, despite economic transformations, the revolutions of the past half-century live on in the recollections of those who experienced them, and in the confused compassion the young people feel for the older generation. In Kramer's former guide of 1969, who has since translated Don Quixote, or a tightrope-walker in the national circus who balances away the specter of lost hopes; in one man who took photos of B52s and another who lost his fingers shooting them down, we meet people who came to know themselves through the collective struggle of war. Their sense of time and change is profound; they suggest answers to the unnamed, restless question this film poses. (JB)