Russelltribunalen

If you want to have something done right, you have to do it yourself, is the motto of the Russell Tribunal. At the height of the Vietnam War, a group of intellectuals begins a series of hearings in the People’s Palace in Stockholm. Is the United States violating international law by attacking North Vietnam, the tribunal wonders. An action that, cynically, makes us chuckle nowadays, but which in 1967 was considered a necessity for lack of United Nations intervention. The “judges,” including standard bearers of the protest generation like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, even have napalm victims fly over from Vietnam to show their burns to the world, in full view of the cameras. The spectators have to witness with their own eyes what the U.S. is perpetrating in Southeast Asia. The questions posed by the tribunal come frighteningly close to the questions raised last year about American action in Iraq. But RUSSELLTRIBUNALEN does not establish this link. The reason for this film does not lie in the historical parallel, but in the great value of the images: the film consists entirely of footage that has never been shown before, as it could not be broadcast for “financial and political reasons.”