It was the 20th century’s most violent war of decolonization. From 1940 to 1954, the jewel in the crown of France’s colonial empire was on fire. The French colonizer and Communist Việt Minh turned the Indochinese peninsula into a blazing inferno that blew away an entire population, an entire world.

Each and every bomb, each and every round of ammunition masked military aid from major Western and Communist powers for whom winning the conflict had become a high stakes objective for the next stage of the Cold War.

For the first time ever, this exceptional documentary aims to recount the entirety of that forgotten conflict, the prelude to the Vietnam War. Far from the clichés of heroic combats, the multiplicity of eyewitness accounts from that era and the stunning power of images reveal a war that was all-out, merciless and decisive: a Dirty War.