Scope and Contents

Approximately 450 16mm films produced by the government of South Vietnam from the 1950s through the 1970s. These films can generally be categorized into three types: newsreels, short documentaries, and longer documentary or propaganda films. The newsreels depict various aspects of South Vietnamese life, such as sporting events, elections, actions of political figures, and cultural events. The documentary films focus on a single subject like the massacre at Hue and military actions of South Vietnamese troops.

Biographical / Historical

The original films were donated to the Library of Congress (LOC) by personnel from the Embassy of South Vietnam before it closed permanently in 1975. The original films remain housed at the Library of Congress, but through a cooperative effort the staff at the LOC shared the films with the Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive so that they could be digitized and displayed in the Virtual Vietnam Archive as well as in the Library of Congress’s online catalog.

For information about this collection, please read this article by Sarah Rouse of the LOC detailing the history of this collection. Sarah Rouse (1986) South Vietnam's film legacy, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 6:2, 211-222, DOI: 10.1080/01439688600260221

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01439688600260221

Please note, the VNCA does not hold the films at our facility, we only have digitized copies.