In 1992, Robert Kramer went back to Vietnam. He had been there in 1969 as part of the collective Newsreel to film People’s War, a partisan and activist film supporting the North Vietnamese liberation movement. More than twenty years later, Kramer returned to work with young Vietnamese filmmakers on four short films, and also to prepare a film himself. Starting Place / Point de départ (1993) opens with a quote by Chris Marker: “I wonder how people used to remember when they didn’t take pictures… How mankind used to remember…” The film visits and revisits people, locations, moments in a country marked by decades of war, post-war trauma, slowly opening towards “the west.”

Starting Place is a film of questions rather than answers: How can one connect to the fights and resistance, but also the frustrations and disappointments of a political project of the 1960s, when Vietnam was an emblem of a small country from the South defying a super power from the Global North?

The screening of the film will be preceded by a short video introduction by Minh Nguyen. It is accompanied by a workshop that contextualizes Kramer’s film and tries to frame some of its subjects from our present moment. What does it mean to act loyal in personal and political terms over a period of decades – from 1969 (the climax of the Vietnam war) via 1975 (the fall of Saigon) and 1989/90 (the end of the Cold War)? How to act (filmically) with empathy and solidarity despite a geographical distance? “I felt an absolute separation between myself here in Europe, and all of them there,” he writes in his preparatory essay ‘Going (back) to Vietnam’ confronted with the images of the Gulf War. In a world ridden by global conflict and military confrontations, this will not sound unfamiliar to us.

1 September 2025, 19:00
Screening: Starting Place (Robert Kramer, 1994, color, 80′)
Reading: Robert Kramer, ‘Going (Back) to Vietnam’ (1991), in Bernard Eisenschitz. Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer, ed. Volker Pantenburg, Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum/Synema 2024, pp. 144–155.
Faculdade das Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa (Auditório)

2 September 2025, 10:00–13:00
Workshop with Volker Pantenburg
Faculdade das Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa (Auditório)

Participation is free and open to all, but registration is mandatory. If you want to join, please write to stefanie.baumann@docskingdom.org

Organized in cooperation with Doc’s Kingdom, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation as part of the research project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the University of Zurich.