Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Barak Goodman






Barak Goodman
's My Lai is a moving and well-told history of the killing of civilians in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. The standardized framing of survivors (such as Pham Thi Thuan and Tran Nam) and soldiers (including Greg Olsen and Fred Widmer) imply that that all of the witnesses contribute important voices to the story. Images by the army photographer that day, Ronald Haeberle, add to the horror of first-hand accounts. The film also chronicles the activities of Charlie Company leading up to My Lai, the subsequent cover-up, and the official investigations that followed. Jerome Walsh, recalling the results of the US Army's review of the matter, says in the film, "Calley got away with it - and all the other people who were involved got away with it also." One hero emerges, Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who saw the massacre for what it was and saved Vietnamese villagers.
Creative Commons License
Documentary Starts Here by Nancy Kalow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.