Kissinger: Screening at the Frontline Club in October

Julia Barron, Head of Current Affairs at October Films, writes an assessment of the documentary film Kissinger which will be screened at the Frontline Club in October.

With access to Dr Henry Kissinger over the past two years, this award-winning documentary gives unique insight into the personality and motivation of one of America’s most powerful  and controversial  international statesman.
 
Film maker Adrian Pennink intercuts twenty hours  of interview with Dr Kissinger by Niall Ferguson, with archive and contemporaneous telephone conversations between him and President Nixon, to recount the extraordinary and violent events of their time in power during the 1970s.
 
Best remembered for negotiating peace with Vietnam, opening up China to the West and creating détente with Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, Kissinger also stands accused of illegally bombing Cambodia, aiding Pinochet’s coup against the elected President of Chile, Salvatore Allende, and arming the Indonesians so they could invade East Timor.
 
But this film is no mea culpa. Kissinger stands resolutely by his historic decisions as he recounts the fulcrum in which they were made.  When controversial questions are asked or he fears how his response will seem, he asks the camera to stop, and it obeys. But there are moments when his control slips, as he recounts his wartime arrival at a concentration camp, the fall of South Vietnam. All in all an intriguing portrait of an international leviathan, who doesn’t dispute he’ll be as much remembered for saying that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac as winning the Nobel  Peace Prize.
 
Kissinger will be screening at the Frontline Club on the 3rd of October, followed by a Q&A with Producer Melanie Fall and Director Adrian Pennink. To book click here.