My father directed Seven Samurai

During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese VietCong guerrillas built a vast network of tunnels in the south of the country as part of the insurgency against the South Vietnamese government and their American allies. The tunnel network was a key base and shelter for the North Vietna ...  Show more

In 1934, one of the most controversial propaganda movies ever made - Triumph of the Will – was filmed at the Nazis’ Nuremberg rally. The two-hour picture was directed by Leni Riefenstahl, once described as Adolf Hitler’s favourite filmmaker. Over four days, scenes of military mar ...  Show more

In the chaos of the helicopter evacuation from Saigon in April 1975, Doan Hoàng Curtis' sister was somehow left behind. It would haunt her family for years. Doan was just three years old when her family made it onto one of the last helicopters to leave Saigon as troops from the c ...  Show more

Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis during World War Two.Once Soviet troops reached Budapest, Wallenberg reported to Soviet officials on 17 January 1945. But he was never seen in public again. Rumours of his fate have circled eve ...  Show more

Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its follow-up takes the lead character to Parisian salons and an underworld of drug dealing so Free Thinking tracks the French connection through film, history and philosophy as Matthew Sweet is joined ...  Show more

Vietnam, or Indochina as it was known, had been under French colonial rule since the nineteenth century. This was until the Vietnamese nationalist group, the Viet Minh, took on the French in 1946. Ho Chi Minh, son of a Confucian scholar, former chef in Boston, and lover of French ...  Show more