Ho Chi Minh spends decades moving between identities: student in Moscow in the years after the Russian Revolution, founder and leader of the communist Vietminh from 1941, and eventually president of a nation he helped bring into being. The film traces his direction of the Vietminh through the Indochina War against French colonial rule from 1946 to 1954, then follows him into the armistice that split the country, when he took both the presidency and the premiership of the new republic before giving up the premiership in 1955 to remain president alone. Archival footage and photographs carry the account of Vietnam's shift from colonial outpost to a state aligned with the communist bloc, and of Ho Chi Minh's later years leading the North against US-backed South Vietnam in the war that ran until 1975, past his own death. The film stays close to the public record of his roles and dates rather than his private life, using the archival material to place him inside the Cold War conflicts that defined Vietnam through the mid-twentieth century.