Director Susan Morgan Cooper on "An Unlikely Weapon" about Vietnam War photographer Eddie Adams

Irvine -- On the 3 August 2009 edition of Subversity, a KUCI public affairs program, we talked with a documentary filmmaker about her latest film, a profile of Pulitizer-Prize winning photographer Eddie Adams.

"An Unlikely Weapon," directed by Susan Morgan Cooper, profiles the life of Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams, who shot the iconic photograph of national police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting to death a captured Viet Cong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem on a Saigon street in 1968.

The photograph, capturing the shooting at the exact moment of impact, won Adams a Pulitzer Prize. The photograph was credited with turning the American public against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Adams, after the war, also documented the plight of Vietnamese refugees leaving their homeland.

An Unlikely Weapon won the Best Documentary award at the Avignon Film Festival in 2008 and was shown earlier this year at the Newport Beach Film Festival.

Cooper, born in Wales, has also made another documentary, one focusing on the Balkan War. She made it after she met a young Croatian girl. The result was "Mirjana: One Girl's Journey." She is currently developing a film on street children in Rio and the death squads that routinely murder them.

Resources

An Unlikely Weapon web site

Wikipedia entry on Eddie Adams

To listen to the 3 August 2009 show with the Susan Morgan Cooper interview, click here: .

We also aired a Making Contact program on the Single-Payer Health Plan, something now rejected by the Obama Administration even as many health activists continue to clamor for it: Many Voices for a Single-Payer System.