Napalm

In his new film, screened at the Cannes Opening Gala this year, titan documentarian Claude Lanzmann returns to North Korea and to his own personal account of events that took place nearly sixty years ago. Lanzmann travels back to 1958 and to a random, yet life-changing encounter between a young Frenchman and Kim Kum-sun, a nurse at the Red Cross hospital in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital. The young man – a member of the first official delegation from Western Europe to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea after the Korean War in which 4 million civilians were killed – and Kim Kum-sun had only one word in common: Napalm.