In the organizer's words:

A SINGLE DAY

The film shows how 18-year-old Larry Colburn made a decision of conscience in 1968 - and refused orders to save Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre.Larry is exemplary for young people faced with this decision. His act saved lives, but he paid a price that stayed with him for the rest of his life. His father was a soldier in Normandy and returned traumatized - Larry knew what war meant.

In the movie today, Connor, Larry's son, says:
"Think about it. Politicians don't send their children. They don't give a shit if you have to go to war."

Trailer & info: Homepage

Press article Manova dec.2025:

The day of decision

The documentary "A Single Day" sheds light on the American massacre in My Lai and tells the story of three courageous soldiers who stood in the way of their own comrades - it will be released in cinemas in early 2026.

In March 2024, the author of this text wrote an article about Christoph Felder's documentary film project "Resistance". Back then, it was about crowdfunding, about the refusal of state film funding to support his film about resistance, about Larry Colburn, who resisted inhumanity in My Lai in 1968. Now, in November 2025, as Defense Minister Boris Pistorius calls young men to muster, as the arms build-up continues and the war rhetoric becomes ever shriller, this film is released in early 2026 with the title "A Single Day": "What do you do when the order comes that goes against your conscience?"

There are days that change history. March 16, 1968 was such a day. While the news was on in German living rooms and the world was preoccupied with the Cold War, the unthinkable happened in the Vietnamese village of My Lai: American soldiers murdered over 500 unarmed civilians - women, children, old people. Four hours of hell that still have repercussions today.

Larry Colburn is 18 years old when he flies over My Lai as a helicopter gunner. A boy from rural Washington State, he grew up skiing and drawing, patriotism in his blood - his father had fought in Normandy.

What Colburn and his crew see that March morning: People on a street, shot while trying to escape. A woman with her skull blown off in front of her eyes. A trench with 150 corpses, in which a single soldier stood and continued to fire into the dying.

Felder's film lets Colburn tell the story - calmly, precisely, like a man who has lived through it a thousand times. "That image is in front of me every day," he says, "along with the regret that we couldn't help her." The woman in the grass, to whom he gave hand signals from the open helicopter door: Stay down, don't move. When they returned from the refueling stop, she was dead.

Hugh Thompson, the 24-year-old pilot, lands his helicopter between American soldiers and a bunker full of terrified civilians. He orders his men - Colburn and Glenn Andreotta - to shoot at their own comrades if they fire on the civilians.

A young man puts his life on the line - for people whose language he doesn't speak, in a war he doesn't understand. Eight to ten people climb out of the bunker. A second helicopter is called in. Thompson shields the civilians with his own body.

This is the scene that every eighteen-year-old who is about to receive his draft notice could think about: the moment when you decide whether to follow orders or follow your conscience.

Captain Ernest Medina gives a speech the evening before: revenge for the fallen comrades, the enemy is cruel, no mercy. The next day, he shoots a wounded woman Colburn has just marked with a smoke grenade to signal for help.

The system is silent from the bottom to the top: From soldier to lieutenant, from captain to colonel, from general to Pentagon.

"From the general of the Americal Division all the way down, I think everyone knew what happened that day," says Ron Haeberle, the photographer who documented the massacre. Everyone knew. Nobody did anything.

The trials became a farce. Out of 26 defendants, only one was convicted: Lieutenant William Calley. Life imprisonment. Released to house arrest after three days on the personal orders of President Richard Nixon. The sentence is reduced - first to 20 years, then to 10, then release. Calley later earns 2,000 dollars per appearance as a perpetrator who speaks about My Lai.

Thompson and Colburn are sent on dangerous missions after their testimony - without adequate cover. Thompson crashes four times, breaking his back. "He thought someone was trying to get rid of him before he left Vietnam," says Colburn.

Back in the USA: death threats, hate mail, dead animals on the doorstep. The politician Mendel Rivers calls for Thompson to be court-martialed - for treason. In officers' clubs, people leave the room when Thompson enters.

The absurdity: According to army records, Colburn dies in Vietnam in 1972. He finds his own death certificate in the VA files. "In a way, they actually made us disappear," he says.

By 2024, it was already clear: government film funding for the production was not to be expected. It was simply not the right subject matter for the "opinion makers" of the time, said Felder. Socially critical, non-conformist documentaries hardly receive any support from the state or federal government, let alone from television. And the public broadcaster (ÖRR) apparently doesn't want to broadcast the film either.

The film was financed by donations, streaming, advance purchases and participations. Independently. Without the blessings of those institutions that are currently trying to get Germany ready for war again.

Felder adds a third layer to his 100-minute documentary: Connor Colburn, Larry's son. "The stories I heard about the Vietnam War gave me a real aversion to war," says Connor. Not abstract stories from textbooks, but his father's trauma, sitting at the kitchen table, present on sleepless nights.

The film also shows Larry Colburn's father landing in Normandy in 1944, leaving with brown hair and coming back with white. "It's amazing how traumas develop over generations," says Felder.

And then Connor says the sentence that also belongs in the German conscription debate: "Don't go to these wars to fight for these rich politicians who would never send their own children to the front because they don't give a shit what happens to you."

2026 marks the tenth anniversary of Larry Colburn's death. Hugh Thompson died in 2006 and Glenn Andreotta was killed a few weeks after My Lai in Vietnam. The three men who did the right thing that day are all dead. Felder completed this movie ten years after Colburn's death.

The mechanisms that made My Lai possible have not disappeared. The dehumanization of the enemy, the justification by "national security", the impunity of those responsible - it all still exists. From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, from drone attacks to war crimes labeled as "collateral damage".

The movie shows that there is always a choice. That obedience is no excuse. That silence is part of the crime.

Author Michael Bilton asks the crucial question in the movie: "There may be an event in your life where you see that something is wrong, and you have a choice whether or not to do something about it."

This takes the popular excuses of soldiers involved in war crimes to the point of absurdity: they were acting on orders. "Courage to resist, that's what it's all about in these bellicose times," says Felder.

Ron Haeberle shows the camera he used to take pictures on March 16, 1968. "This is the camera I used on March 16, 1968. These are the last pictures." Haeberle says: "I am guilty of the cover-up. Every soldier there is guilty of the cover-up."

Connor recounts scattering his father's ashes on a mountaintop. "I'm still waiting for something positive to come out of all this," Larry Colburn had said.

In 2016, Larry Colburn died of cancer at the age of 67. His wife Lisa said shortly after his death: "He was a very peaceful man who had a great desire for there to be a peaceful world."

What Felder captures is the story of people who maintained moral clarity in impossible situations. And the story of a society that punished these people for it.