A screening for the 2018 documentary film: DATELINE – SAIGON: Lies Deception and the Dangerous Search for Truth. Directed by Thomas D. Herman, Narrated by Sam Waterston

Tuesday 27 November, 5.00pm
Pichette Auditorium, Pembroke College, OX1 1DW
Admission Free, registeration recommend to guarantee a seat

“If the government is telling the truth, reporters become a minor, relatively unimportant conduit to what is happening. But when the government doesn’t tell the truth, begins to twist the truth, hide the truth, then the journalist becomes involuntarily infinitely more important.”

— David Halberstam, The New York Times, in Dateline – Saigon

Today we know the story’s end. But few then realized how important their reporting was; how our protagonists and their colleagues serve as role models for today’s front-line reporters around the globe. Dateline - Saigon illuminates the difficulties of reporting war by focusing on America’s most important and controversial case study: Vietnam, the war that established many of the ground rules for coverage of wars that followed and ignited an antagonism between the media and the military that unfortunately endures. The parallels to the challenges journalists face in reporting today’s conflicts - and the consequences of not getting the story out - will become disturbingly obvious to the viewer.

Dateline - Saigon was filmed over a 12 year period in the United States, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Vietnam, and Iraq. The film features multiple, original interviews with key characters, some of whom are no longer living, and rare archival motion picture and still photographs, many from private archives and to be seen publicly for the first time.

Dateline - Saigon is produced and directed by Boston-based filmmaker, Thomas D. Herman, a Co-Producer of the Emmy-award winning feature film Live From Baghdad starring Michael Keaton and Helena Bonham-Carter. Herman spent twelve years researching, filming, and interviewing over 50 writers, photojournalists, radio and television correspondents, government officials, historians, and others for this project. “The film is about a group of journalists who risked their lives to bring back a story no one wanted revealed.” Telling the truth about what was happening in Vietnam, Herman says, illustrated a shift away from traditional media support of any US war effort.”

Dateline – Saigon © 2018 Good Neighbor Productions, Inc.