Mysteries in the Archives

Moscow, 1959. Russians visit the first exhibition organized by the United States in the Soviet Union. On the day of the inauguration, a verbal joust took place between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. What for?

Antarctica in 1929. For the first time, Americans set foot on this still little-explored continent. They will be the first to reach the South Pole by air with an aircraft donated by the manufacturer Ford.

Beijing, Saturday, October 1, 1949. From a podium erected in Tiananmen Square, in front of a huge crowd, Mao Zedong proclaimed the birth of the People's Republic of China, soon putting an end to the civil war that had opposed communists and nationalists for many years. But the color images of the event would not be unveiled until seventy years later. What for? By whom were these images filmed? How and with whom did the communist leader prepare to govern?

In 1936, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had tried to recover the United States from the 1929 crisis, ran again for a second term. By train and car, he travelled through some thirty states for six months. The tour proved all the more difficult to organize because the president was paraplegic. Are reporters free to film and photograph him during his travels? If he is re-elected, does Roosevelt intend to continue his policy in favor of the poorest?

In the midst of the Cold War, more than 900 Koreans living in Japan leave this capitalist country to settle in North Korea, a communist country. They will be followed by some 100,000 other Koreans who hope to find a better life in North Korea. It should be remembered that Korea, their country of origin, was colonized in 1910 by Japan and that the Japanese government brought in nearly 2 million Koreans to serve as labor. What was the status of the 600,000 Koreans still living in Japan in 1959? Why go to North Korea, a country they don't know much about? Japan and North Korea have no diplomatic relations. Why and how did their governments agree to encourage these departures?