THE TRIALS OF
HENRY KISSINGER
Year: 2002
USA: First Run Features
Cast: Brian Cox, Salvador Allende, Gerald Ford, Christopher Hitchens, Lyndon Johnson, Henry Kissinger, Duc Tho Le, Richard Nixon, Augusto Pinochet, Rene Schneider Jr, Rene Schneider
Director: Eugene Jarecki
Country: USA
USA: 80 mins
USA Release Date: 25 September 2002 (Limited Release)
Synopsis
Laureate and the most famous diplomat of his generation - also a war criminal?
Their interest sparked by the Christopher Hitchens book, filmmakers Jarecki and Gibney have developed a movie, which is both a brilliant legal brief and chilling psychodrama. Some of Henry Kissinger's most ardent supporters (Alexander Haig, Brent Scowcroft, William Safire) vie with his detractors (writers Seymour Hersh, William Shawcross, Hitchens himself).
Charges that Kissinger was instrumental in creating the coup that toppled Chilean President Allende, that he undermined LBJ's Vietnam peace talks (prolonging the war by seven years), engineered the secret bombing of Cambodia, and approved Indonesian president Suharto's use of US arms to massacre 100,000 East Timorese have resulted in summonses by five nations seeking to depose him.
The film plumbs the depth of one man's soul, as it questions tenets of international law: do war criminals reside only in nations whose interests are inimical to our own -- or are we our own worst enemy?