Last Days in Vietnam, First Days in the USA

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Last Days in Vietnam, the American Experience documentary  about the 1975 evacuation from Saigon, premieres in April 2015 on PBS. However, it's playing in theaters over the next two months in select cities, starting this Friday in New York City. You can see a complete list of cities and theaters here.

Filmmaker Rory Kennedy and PBS have also launched the First Days Story Project, an Indiegogo campaign to raise money to document the stories of both the American military members who returned home and the Vietnamese refugees who came to the USA after they left Saigon. They're close to their $132,000 goal and they're hoping the theatrical showings will help fully fund the project.

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There are now 1.7 million Americans of Vietnamese descent but no one has yet systematically documented the stories of the families who arrived here almost forty years ago. They'll work with NPR's StoryCorps and travel to six cities (New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, San Francisco and two more cities to be determined) to show the film and interact with the Vietnamese and veteran communities. The stories will be permanently archived in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

If you've got a connection to the Saigon evacuation, either as a veteran or an immigrant, there's a way to tell your story directly to the producers.

Check out the trailer for the film below:

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