Le Ciel, la Terre

With Le ciel, la terre Ivens attempted to make a film that joins together North and South Vietnam. He shows both the fight by the Buddhists in the South as the army preparing itself in the North. We are also witnesses to the enormous influence and aggression of the Americans, and the peacework still being carried on in the countryside. Ivens aimed at achieving a synthesis that would give as exact an image as possible of the situation in Vietnam. Not just from one perspective, but from various points of view. The documentary is a call for sympathy for Vietnam and a rejection of the aggressive and hypocritical politics of the Americans. Ivens formulated his ideas about this film as follows: "I want to show: Vietnam in war, the North, the South, the American point of view, that of the fighters, mine. I want to be informative, to tell the truth about the situation. (...) I have to put my films in the service of my ideals; this is the unity of thought and action that I have formed in my life. There's no discrepancy between what I think, what I do, what I want and what I express." (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)