The shocking "brief encounter" in 1958 between a French member of the first Western European delegation invited to North Korea after the devastating Korean War and a nurse from the Korean Red Cross hospital in Pyongyang, the capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Nurse Kim Kun Sun and the French delegate had only one word in common that they both understood: "Napalm," which gave the film its title. Claude Lanzmann returned to Korea without permission to film, and each shot represents an extraordinary victory over the permanent control of the regime's political police, who did not discover the true reasons for their return to the extreme north peninsula until sixty years later.