Viewing: March 29,2026
Join us Sunday, March 29th at 7:00 p.m. for a special event screening of two documentaries by Ohio University alumna Robin Smith to celebrate Ohio Goes to The Movies and Vietnam Veterans Day!
Admission is FREE – Tickets are required
A reception with filmmaker Robin Smith will take place at The Athena from 6:00-7:00 p.m
We were asleep when the telegram arrived. Two Marines in uniform, feeling out of place in Athens, Ohio, stood nervously on our front porch. Mom’s face must have betrayed her deepest fear. The colonel, my father’s friend, rushed in.
“Jane, he’s only missing!”
Words filled with hope, to comfort a wife too young to be a widow.
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Robin Smith will introduce two powerful films chronicling her family’s search for answers about the fate of Colonel Robert N. Smith (USMC) whose plane was shot down over North Vietnam in 1969.
About the films
He’s Only Missing (1978, 30 min)
This film explores the “state of limbo” Robin and her family were experiencing not knowing if their loved one was dead or alive.
Letting Go (1995, 12 min)
Two decades later the first shred of information about what had happened emerged. Robin traveled with a CBS News crew to her father’s crash site in Vietnam and uncovered answers that had eluded the family for years.
About the Speaker
Robin Smith is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker with 48 years of professional experience. A graduate of Ohio University (BFA ’72) and the School of Public Communication at Boston University (MS ’78), her first documentary was a personal story about her father, a fighter pilot declared Missing in Action in 1969 during the Vietnam war. CBS bought rights to the film, and in 1978 and she began a career in broadcast journalism on CBS News Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt.
In 1990, she established a nonprofit production company to collaborate with educators, artists, and innovative program leaders in the creation of documentary shorts and public awareness videos. Examples of video|action’s award-winning work can be found at www.videoaction.org.
Robin Smith is currently a member of the Chaddock + Morrow College of Fine Arts Leadership Council and a Trustee on the Ohio University Foundation Board.
