In this diaristic work filmmaker Lynn Sachs travels from Saigon to Hanoi with her sister, Dana, a reporter living in Vietnam. Along the way, the two sisters offer their own reflections on the war—which they experienced largely through the lens of American television—as they encounter a completely changed country from the one they learned to fear as children.

Lynne Sachs’s Investigation of a Flame is an intimate and experimental documentary portrait of nine suburban protesters who walked into a Cantonsville, Maryland draft board office on May 17, 1968, grabbed hundreds of selective service records, and burned them with homemade napalm. Over the last two years, Sachs tracked down six of the seven living members of the Cantonsville Nine (including Daniel and Philip Berrigan)—now in their late sixties—and interviewed and interviewed them about their politically and religiously motivated action. Sachs’s poetic essay about the resistance of citizens at the height of the Vietnam War explores not only their act of civil disobedience but the profoundly personal ways in which the revelations and disappointments of aging have contributed to their retrospective ambivalence about the experience.