The long and bloody shadow of the Vietnam War continues to haunt the political landscape in the United States and abroad. The war's catastrophic death toll (estimated at two million Vietnamese and sixty-thousand Americans), its devastating effects on every level of Vietnamese society, and its lasting repercussions on US domestic and foreign policy make it one of the twentieth century's most important military engagements. The "ten-thousand-day war" surpassed by far the Second World War in both its duration and mind-boggling expenditure of ordinance, becoming the nexus of ideological rebellion in the United States and an enduring symbol of twentieth-century imperialism run amok, and then aground, on an unyielding dream of nationalism.

Like an inextinguishable fire, to borrow a phrase from filmmaker Harun Farocki, the debates, conundrums, and lessons of Vietnam have returned to bedevil the architects of the current Iraq war. In light of the pressing parallels to be explored between the tragic South East Asian quagmire and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and given the re-emergence of several important films - including the restorations of two seminal documentaries, HEARTS AND MINDS (1974) and IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG (1969); a new print of THE ANDERSON PLATOON (1968), the rarely-seen Academy Award®-winning chronicle of a squad's combat experiences; the near-apocryphal WINTER SOLDIER (1972), a harrowing confessional on the horrors of military occupation; the twentieth anniversary of PLATOON (1986), Oliver Stone's hugely popular Reagan-era grunt drama; and the recent release of SIR! NO SIR! (2005), which covers the largely forgotten story of the GI anti-war movement - there seems to have never been a more apt time for a re-viewing of the Vietnam War.

With its slate of indispensable films about the war, this programme is proof of the cinema's primacy as a means of preserving history and memory. These essential works go a long way towards separating fact from myth and dispelling those factors that characterized the American venture in Vietnam, and which invariably obscure any given historical moment, but in particular one fraught with the political and economic exigencies of warfare: deception, ignorance, and ideological dogmatism (as Orwell famously commented, the first casualty of war is always