Agent Orange: A Personal Requiem

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.

Many people in Germany have decided to phase out nuclear power plants and switch to renewable energy sources by 2022. The film traces the postwar path of German citizens who continue to think and act on their own initiative, and explores the hope for “Morgen” (German for “tomorrow”) that they have found.

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.