User Reviews

Joris Ivens is a great figure in documentary cinema, but this is just a dull, repetitive and misleading Socialist Realist propaganda piece. 35mm.online offers far greater Polish documentaries and if you must see a Stalin era Polish film director, make it Tadeusz Makarczynski. A Valparaiso is a far superior film by Ivens.

I really don't know what to say... If you know socialist realist cinema, then there is nothing else to present: the enemy is bad, we are always good, we can achieve the absurdly impossible and a painfully didactic repetition of themes. The film is simple, shallow propaganda with very little in the way of entertainment value, visual experimentation or intellectual depth.

Do yourself a favour and stay away from this film.

The English language version of this movie is "Peace Will Win." It was black and white, released on 16mm. I got a copy from the woods of North Idaho, of all places.

Joris Ivens is, in my opinion, the "Godfather of independent political film." If you are not familiar with him, then do a bit of net research to find his filmography etc. My introduction to his work was this film. As an indymedia activist, I was surprised that I had not previously know of him, but he is little known in the US.

"Peace Will Win" documents a world peace congress held in 1950. The world wanted peace, but there was the US war against Korea going on, and at the conference a report was presented that detailed the US use of a new horrible weapon, the Napalm Bomb. This was only 5 years after the US had used the Atom Bomb on Japan. The film has footage of destroyed Korean cities, dead and wounded women and children. I have never seen footage of the destruction of Korea from any other source.

This film is considered one of Iven's less important works, so it has not been shown--to my knowledge--anywhere for a long time, not even in Joris Ivens festivals. But for Americans, it is an important film, because it is our government that the film targets, and other than the book "Hidden History of the Korean War," there isn't too much out there except the official US government line on this conflict from half a century ago. Now that the US is again calling North Korea one the the "Axis of Evil" nations, it seems important to examine the history of this period to understand the present. This film, with its contrary view of that period, is very useful in that regard.

Never got the money to digitize the entire 16min 50-something minute movie, but I made a 6 minute "trailer" of sorts of "Peace Will Win" and will post it on the PepperSpray site so that others can get a sense of what it and Joris Ivens are all about. To watch the trailer, go to www.peppersprayproductions.org, then to videos.

Randy Rowland, pepperspray@mac.com