Jean Lacouture

In seven different parts, Godard, Ivens, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais, and Varda show their sympathy for the North-Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War.

Someone we hear talking - but whom we do not see - speaks of a project which describes the four key moments of love: meeting, physical passion, arguments/separation and making up. This project is to be told through three couples: young, adult and old. We do not know if the project is for a play, a film, a novel or an opera. The author of the project is always accompanied by a kind of servant. Meanwhile, two years earlier, an American civil servant meets with an elderly French couple who had fought in the Resistance during World War II, brokering a deal with a Hollywood director to buy the rights to tell their story. The members of the old couple's family discuss heatedly questions of nation, memory and history.

Thwarted many times in their quest for independence, the Vietnamese independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh finally decisively defeated Vietnam's French colonial overlords at Dien Bien Phu in May of 1954. This documentary uses interviews and newsreel footage to examine the conflict between the French and the Vietnamese. In addition to Vietnam, French Indochina also included Cambodia and Laos. The French-Indochina War lasted from 1946 to 1956, when a Geneva Conference agreement mandated a cease-fire in a temporarily divided Vietnam. It is well to note that it is only after this time that the two Vietnams went to war against each other.

François Mitterrand has dominated French history over the last 30 years. Through the longevity of his political career, which spanned two republics; through his rise to the highest office, which he held for 14 years; and through his leadership of the Left, François Mitterrand’s political destiny has been exceptional. Successively leader of a Resistance party a year after leaving Vichy, a minister at the age of 29, leader of the anti-Gaullist movement, the man who reinvented the Socialist Party, President of the Republic and architect of the Maastricht Treaty establishing the European Union, he appears to be a character straight out of a novel, whose life is divided into distinct chapters.

Jean Lacouture and Patrick Rotman interview the witnesses of François Mitterrand's life. Their testimonies, which both complement and contradict each other, write the story of a life: the youth, the Vichy regime and the Resistance during the Second World War, the Fifth Republic and the Algerian war, the conquest of the Elysée, the backstage of power and the secrets of a president.