Hearts and Minds

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Director Peter Davis describes his Academy Award-winning documentary Hearts and Minds as "an attempt to examine why we went to Vietnam, what we did there and what the experience did to us." Compared by critics at the time to Marcel Ophuls' acclaimed documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1971), Hearts and Minds similarly addressed the wartime effects of national myths and prejudices by juxtaposing interviews of government officials, soldiers, peasants and parents, cinéma vérité scenes shot on the home front and in South Vietnam, clips from ideological Cold War movies, and horrific archival footage.

Author Frances FitzGerald praised the documentary as "the most moving film I've ever seen on Vietnam, because, for the first time, the camera lingers on the faces of Vietnamese and one hears their voices." Author David Halberstam said it "brilliantly catches ... the hidden, unconscious racism of the war." Others from both ends of the political spectrum chided it as manipulative propaganda that oversimplified complexities.

Hearts and Minds was added to the National Film Registry in 2018.

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