Lighter than Orange – The Legacy of Dioxin in Vietnam

Lighter than Orange, 72 min, documentary film with subtitles EN, FR, DE, VN available as DCP: EN and DE; BLURAY: EN and DE, DVD: EN, DE, FR, VN, E (from 12/2015 IT: 2016)

“It smelled sweet,” one woman remembered, “like ripe guavas.” Others remember it hanging in the air like a thick fog. Some say when aircrafts sprayed, it looked like stripes of powder decorating the sky. Yet their poetic observations are in stark contrast to the devastating power of Agent Orange and the painful consequences the Vietnamese people would soon experience.

Director: Matthias Leupold

Matthias Leupold, was born in East Berlin in 1959. Since

the 1980s he has been creating a parallel world through

his staged photography. Scenes from this world have

been exhibited in over 50 exhibitions in Europe, Asia

and the USA, and are published in several books, as

well as archived in international collections. Leupold is a

professor of Photography at an art and design university

in Berlin. It was during a trip with his photography students

to Vietnam in 2011, that Leupold first came in personal

contact with victims of Agent Orange, and it was out of

these encounters that he developed the material for this

documentary.

Specifications

Film Type:Documentary

Runtime:1 hour 12 minutes

Completion Date:February 1, 2015

Production Budget:124,000 USD

Country of Origin:Germany

Country of Filming:Viet Nam

Film Language:English, Vietnamese