Good intentions

Thanks to my old, old, old friends Doug & Heidi for the heads-ups re the free streamability of these two Oscar®-nominated documentaries, a moving short and an amazing feature. The link at each title will take you to the film, except note that Last Days is available only through Sunday, Feb. 8; I believe it is to air on PBS April 28, right before the 40th anniversary of the evacuation of Saigon.

Last Days in Vietnam

(2014)

Like everyone of my generation, I remembered some broadcast images and had a vague sense of the facts of the U.S. evacuation from Saigon as North Vietnamese troops bore down on the city, but this film is a stunning education about the events of those end days in 1975--the misjudgments, the betrayals, the heroism, and the flat-out luck, both spectacularly good and disastrously bad, that got Vietnamese friends of the American war effort (i.e., traitors from the perspective of the winning side) taken out of or left behind in the soon-to-be Ho Chi Minh City. Mouth agape a sizable percentage of the time.

The short subject was Nasza klatwa (Our curse), a film made by young husband and wife Tomasz Śliwiński and Magda Hueckel about their son Leo, born with congenital central hypoventilation syndrome, "Ondine's curse,"  which will probably keep him on a ventilator for his probably very short life. The film is notable for its honest and unsentimental portrait of the family, and (I say this as a good thing) for the feel of a fiction short.