Return With Honor
Screening on Film
Directed by Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders.
US, 1998, 35mm, color, 102 min.
US, 1998, 35mm, color, 102 min.
Downed American pilots taken captive by North Vietnamese troops faced excruciating physical and psychological conditions: elaborate torture techniques, squalid cells, disease, madness, and the thought of never returning home again. Their tales of survival are recounted here in interviews and supplemented with footage shot both before their imprisonment, and after, as Viet Cong propaganda. Remarkable feats born out of desperation abound—prisoners communicated with each other by tapping out codes, and one pilot, also an artist, drew pictures on the walls with his own blood.