In 1967, filmmaker Joris Ivens and his partner Marceline Loridan spent two months living in a small peasant village just above the border that separated north and south Vietnam. There, beneath the ever-present sound of bombs, life struggles on. This too rarely seen film captures the terror and joy of life lived with total commitment.

“[Ivens’s] film is the image of this little peasant world—patient, serene, intractable—which takes the war as one of those cataclysms against which its history and wisdom has taught it to be organized and to endure with a cheerful stoicism.” Jean Lacouture, Libération, 1968