Morgen

AGENT ORANGE is one woman's personal journey through Vietnam to try to understand the ravages caused by chemicals in the Vietnam War, and to come to terms with her husband's premature death. Her observation of the way in which Vietnamese families and health organisations are coping with ongoing deformities in children, even after all these years, is an extraordinary revelation, deeply moving and deeply disturbing.

Fifty years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring warned of the danger of widespread use of pesticides, helping to launch the environmental movement in the US. Around the same time, the US military began to spray defoliants in Vietnam to deny cover to guerrilla forces. The defoliants, including Agent Orange, were contaminated with the deadly toxin, dioxin. Agent Orange continues to affect the children and grandchildren of those exposed in Vietnam and America to this day.

After being told that her husband Greg Davis, a Vietnam veteran and photographer, died unexpectedly in 2003 from defoliant during the Vietnam War, Director Sakata began to travel to Vietnam to learn what had happened to him. There, she witnessed children born with severe disabilities due to the effects of Agent Orange, even 30 years after the war, and the families who nurtured and cared for them. Although Vietnam has achieved remarkable economic development since then, the victims and their families have been left behind. The film depicts these people, the doctors who continue their support activities, and the former journalists who filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government and the company that produced the defoliant, as they continue to face the scars of the war.

The world after WWII is largely defined as nuclear age. The nuclear energy has been sold as “peaceful” use of atoms, while in essence it is the same as nuclear weapons. The film visits the people and land damaged by pursuit of atomic power both as weapons as well as sources of energy around the world and questions the future of nuclear age.