The final episode in the April 1975 evacuation of the American Embassy in Saigon is calmly surveyed in this chronicle of the efforts to get the thousands of Vietnamese who had loyally served the American cause and the South Vietnamese government out of the country safely as the Communist North closed in. A fair and compassionate reconstruction of a very messy chapter in history. USA, 2014, 98 minutes, documentary
Post-screening discussion with Rockland County resident Minh Uong, who left Vietnam on April 30, 1975, and journalist Francis Wilkinson. Minh was turned away from the evacuation at the United States Embassy in Saigon, but found his way onto a boat a few days later from a different city. He was 13.
“A film of great sadness, but also a galvanizing depiction of heroism.” — Walter Addiego, San Francisco Chronicle
“In Kennedy’s scrupulous, adroit hands, Last Days in Vietnam plays like a wartime thriller, with heroes engaging in jaw- dropping feats of ingenuity and derring do.” —Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
“These Stranger-than-fiction tales, piled one on top of the other in the most gripping way, not only mesmerize us, they also point up another of Last Days in Vietnam’s provocative points, that the chaos surrounding the evacuation was, in effect, the entire war in microcosm” — Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times
