Cong Binh Trailer -St VN

On the eve of the Second World War, twenty thousand Vietnamese people were recruited in French Indochina and were forced to come work in French weapon factories to stand in for workers who had been sent to fight the Germans. Mistaken for soldiers, they were stuck in France after the defeat in 1940; during the Occupation, these workers – who were called “Cong Binh” – were left at the mercy of the Germans and lived like pariahs. They were pioneers in rice culture in the Camargue. Wrongly accused of betraying their native Viet Nam, they were all actually great followers of Ho Chi Minh and rooting for the Independence in 1945.
The film follows around two dozen survivors in Viet Nam and in France. Five of them died during the editing of the movie. They tell us today what their everyday life in a colonized country was like. Here is a page of the history between France and Viet Nam which has shamefully been erased from the collective memory.