Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2006

Winter Soldier
Winterfilm Collective (U.S., 1972)

“Made in 1972, Winter Soldier has the otherworldly yet firmly earthbound immediacy of the best documentaries of its era, in particular, the black-and-white work of William Klein, Frederick Wiseman, and the Maysles brothers. Voices and faces are the main ingredients here: the participants in the Winter Soldier investigation testify to the atrocities they witnessed and took part in while in Vietnam. . . . This is no Oliver Stone leap into Samuel Barber–scored heroic tragedy, just an unflinchingly clear-eyed extended gaze at military-brand, all-American inhumanity—the racism, emotionally cauterized machismo, and governmental evil that result in mass bloodshed. When 109 Vietnam veterans and sixteen civilians gathered at a Howard Johnson's in Detroit to discuss a war that was still raging, the media reacted with skepticism, if at all. . . . If a collective of filmmakers—including people who've gone on to put history on celluloid in Harlan County, USA; Regret to Inform; and The Word Is Out—hadn't been present, the human impact of war would not have been captured.”--Johnny Ray Huston, S.F. Bay Guardian

• (95 mins, B&W/Color, Beta SP, From Milestone)