Sad Song of Yellow Skin
1970 · 58m · Canada
Directed by Michael Rubbo
Genres: documentary, essay film, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In Saigon in 1970, three young American journalists encounter residents living at the edges of the Vietnam War. Their experiences reveal a city crowded with refugees and orphans and strained by the American presence.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a war documentary that refuses to film the war—instead Rubbo corners American journalists in Saigon and makes them reckon with what they're NOT seeing, which is a genuinely perverse move that shouldn't work but does.
Rubbo positions himself squarely in the essay-film tradition, using the journalists as unreliable narrators of their own complicity, a formal strategy that echoes Marker and Godard while building something wholly its own about witnessing and removal.
The masterstroke is letting the camera linger on the subjects' silences and deflections—Rubbo doesn't cut away from discomfort, and that refusal to smooth over the awkwardness becomes the entire moral argument of the film.