On the eve of his exile in 1814 to the Tuscan island of Elba, the Emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, abdicated power and bade farewell to his ministers in a ceremony at the Château de Fontainebleau, a sprawling complex of residences and gardens roughly thirty miles southeast of Paris. The palace had been expanded, decorated and preserved since the twelfth century under successive French monarchs. During the Second World War, Nazi officers occupied Fontainebleau and after the war it became an official residence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command. An extraordinary artefact of European cultural and political history, Fontainebleau was also the setting, in July 1946, for a paradigm shift in South-East Asian documentary film history, for it was here that two Vietnamese immigrants living in Paris preserved on film a conference between delegations from the newly established Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, 1945–76) and from the government of the Fourth French Republic (1946–58). The film focuses on President Ho Chi Minh, who sought independence for Vietnam but left the Château de Fontainebleau that summer with only a modus vivendi for future talks with the French government that never occurred. Three months later, the First Indochina War (1946–54) erupted.

This chapter sets out the social and film-historical context of the three short films produced that summer and projected as newsreels in rural areas of Vietnam prior to the outbreak of hostilities. These three films were later combined and repurposed to form the feature-length documentary Ho Chi Minh in France (Mai Thu, 1946). Several versions of the resulting film are held by the Vietnam Film Institute archives in Hanoi and these include voice-over narration, graphics and additional footage from later periods in history, including scenes of war. The original version, however, appeared in short newsreel segments that were used to heighten awareness of the events at Fontainebleau among the peasantry in Vietnam and alert them to the imminent conflict, which erupted in the ensuing months. These three newsreel segments of early independence material ushered in the era of state-sponsored documentary film production and launched the period of national cinema in Vietnam.