Napalm, A Tribute to Claude Lanzmann

The Los Angeles premiere of the last film by Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah

Los Angeles Filmforum and Acropolis Cinema present
Napalm, A Tribute to Claude Lanzmann
Monday September 24, 2018, 8:00pm
At the Downtown Independent, 251 S. Main Street, Los Angeles CA 90012

Napalm is the story of the breathtaking and brief encounter, in 1958, between a French member of the first Western European delegation officially invited to North Korea after the devastating Korean war (4 million civilians killed) and a nurse working for the Korean Red Cross hospital, in Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Nurse Kim Kun Sun and the French delegate had only one word in common, that both could understand: “Napalm”, hence the title. Claude Lanzmann returned to Korea without the permission to film and each take represents an extraordinary victory over the permanent control of the regime’s political police, who discovered the real reasons for his return, sixty years later, to the peninsula of the extreme North. (uniFrance)
“A mini-masterpiece… to my mind one of the year’s most romantic films.” – Christopher Small, Sight & Sound

“[A] fascinating and gripping story, at least partly for what Lanzmann leaves out and a possibility he does not wish to acknowledge.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“It’s in the natty particulars and the way Lanzmann remembers them — slow, honest, sometimes arduous — that Napalm finds its value as a cultural document and political statement. [It’s] deeply realistic about the pain and impossibility of human experience in a hawkish world in which gunless wars are the unremitting norm.” – Jaymes Durante, 4:3

“Napalm mines Lanzmann’s own prejudices and past to reveal that a mere passing anecdote in the 20th century’s political and human history in fact holds at its core the wisdom of the tragedy of the battle of communism and capitalism.” – Daniel Kasman, MUBI Notebook

“A supreme storyteller… In Napalm [Lanzmann] uses his own experience to fuel the narrative. What results is a unique look at a place and people who we have mostly known through news reports or government propaganda, but rarely in movies through such a human point of view.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ejofZub9yw
Tickets: $12 general; for Filmforum members. Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3600468 or at the door.

For more information: www.lafilmforum.org or 323-377-7238 or https://www.acropoliscinema.com/napalm

Screening:
Napalm
Director: Claude Lanzmann
Producer: Francois Margolin; Director of photography: Caroline Champetier
2017, color, sound, 1 hour, 40 min.