A documentary called A Price We Have to Pay (Un precio que tenemos que pagar) has premiered at the 41st Mar del Plata International Film Festival in Argentina, and it tells a story that connects two countries more than 17,000km apart. Directed by Argentine filmmaker Ricardo Preve, the film investigates what happened to Ignacio Ezcurra, a correspondent for Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación who went missing in Vietnam in 1968 while covering the war.
The investigation began with a photograph published in 1968 that purportedly showed the journalist's body in Chợ Lớn, Saigon. More than half a century later, Preve and his team set out to piece together the truth — digging through archives and interviewing witnesses across Argentina, Vietnam and the United States. The research continued even during filming, with new documents forcing revisions to the narrative and edit.
The premiere drew an emotional crowd. Vietnam's Ambassador to Argentina, Ngô Minh Nguyệt, attended, along with producer Corina López Roach and narrator Clara Preve Durrieu, a former AP journalist who has covered Ukraine and drew parallels between conflicts decades apart. Perhaps the most moving moment: Rosario Ezcurra Caprile, Ignacio's sister, travelled from Mexico to see the film about her brother for the first time. She was a teenager when she waved him off at the airport, and the family lived with unanswered questions for decades. She thanked the Vietnamese government for helping clarify the circumstances of his death.
For travellers with an interest in Vietnam's history, there's a concrete detail worth noting: the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City includes a memorial space dedicated to Ezcurra, honouring the journalists who died covering the war. Preve Durrieu, who travelled to Vietnam for filming, spoke admiringly of how modern Ho Chi Minh City has become while keeping its cultural identity intact, and described interviews with Vietnamese witnesses who saw some of the events connected to Ezcurra first-hand.
The film isn't widely available yet. It gets a commercial release in Argentina on March 4, 2027, but Vietnamese audiences get an earlier look — it's been selected for the Panorama section of the Hanoi International Film Festival (HANIFF), screening on December 1 this year.
Why should a traveller care? Beyond the film itself, Ezcurra's story highlights a side of Vietnam many visitors miss. The War Remnants Museum is one of Ho Chi Minh City's most powerful and sobering sights, and knowing that a foreign correspondent has his own memorial there underscores how international the war's story really was. For Argentine visitors especially, it's a genuine — and little-known — historical link between the two countries. If you're in Hanoi in early December, the HANIFF screening offers a rare chance to see the documentary before its 2027 release.
