“We have the right to protect ourselves from being poisoned.”
–Carol Van Strum, Oregon anti-herbicide activist
The Agent Orange catastrophe did not end with the Vietnam War. Today, the world over, a primary
chemical of the toxic defoliant controls weeds in farming, forestry, parks, playgrounds… It wreaks havoc on the human genome, causing deformed births and deadly cancers.
After decades of struggle and tragic personal losses, two heroic women are leading a worldwide movement to end the plague and hold the manufacturers accountable. In France, Tran To Nga is suing the American chemical industry for poisoning her in Vietnam. In America, Carol Van Strum exposes the continuing use of toxic herbicides, many still containing dioxin.
Incriminating documents disappear. Activists are threatened. A helicopter technician secretly films the contamination of reservoirs, while a massive industrial cover-up continues.
Find out more on the film’s Website.
See our other Grantees.
ALAN ADELSON, DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/WRITER
ALAN ADELSON works in both film and print. His film and television credits include: One Survivor Remembers, (HBO,) 1995, European production coordinator, winner of the Best Short Documentary Oscar and three Emmy Awards; as producer, director and writer: Lodz Ghetto, (PBS, Channel Four, 9 other countries) short-listed for Best Feature Length Documentary Oscar, 1989, winner, International Film Critics Prize, 8 international film festivals; Two Villages in Kosovo, 2006, (ARTE, RTE), and In Bed With Ulysses, 2012. Adelson made worldwide headlines with his investigative articles in Esquire and the Wall Street Journal revealing the disappearance of enriched plutonium from a nuclear reprocessing plant.
KATE TAVERNA, DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/EDITOR
KATE TAVERNA Taverna co-directed, produced and edited In Bed with Ulysses as well as co-directed and edited the feature length Lodz Ghetto, both of which had nationwide theatrical releases. Adelson and Taverna also collaborated on Deux Villages au Kosovo for ARTE France and Germany, and RTE Ireland and Agent Orange:la derniere bataille for ARTE France and Germany. Taverna has edited more than 50 films over her career: Asylum and Killing in the Name were Academy award nominees in Best Short Documentary category in 2004 and 2011 respectively. The feature length Pray the Devil Back to Hell won Best Documentary award at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry won the Audience award at the 2014 Boston Independent film festival, released theatrically nationwide and was translated into 22 languages and shown globally on Netflix. She is now directing and editing a short documentary The Art of Metaphor, and edited The Day Iceland Stood Still a feature doc for Icelandic TV.
VERONIQUE BERNARD, PRODUCER/WRITER
VERONIQUE BERNARD is an independent non-fiction film and television producer, director and senior executive whose experience includes WNET Culture & Arts Documentaries, Sundance Channel Original Programming, New York Times Television, National Geographic Television, ABC News Productions and SBS Television in Australia where she was Head of Production. Recent credits include doc series E2: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious (PBS/Sundance, Grantham Prize for Excellence in Environmental Journalism Award of Merit 2009,) French feature doc co-production The Man Who Invented Himself: Duane Michals (Special Mention Prize International Festival of Film on Art FIFA 2013,) science series Redesign My Brain (ABC Australia, Science Channel, Discovery International 2012, 2014,) PBS series Art in the Twenty-First Century (2016), feature docs Enter The Faun (America Reframed, 2017,) The People vs. Agent Orange (Independent Lens, Arte, 2020-2021) Chasing Childhood (2020) and As Prescribed (2022,) and doc short Game Changer (Tribeca/BET 2021.)