{"id":255,"date":"2012-05-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-28T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/hell-and-back-again\/"},"modified":"2022-07-22T16:03:22","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T23:03:22","slug":"hell-and-back-again","status":"publish","type":"films","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/documentaries\/hell-and-back-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Hell and Back Again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 2009, U.S. Marines launch a major helicopter assault on a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. Within hours of being dropped deep behind enemy lines, 25-year-old Sergeant Nathan Harris\u2019s unit (U.S. Marines Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment) is attacked from all sides. Cut off and surrounded, the Marines fight a ghostlike enemy and experience immense hostility from displaced villagers caught in the middle.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>When Sergeant Harris returns home to North Carolina after a life-threatening injury in battle, the film evolves from a war expos\u00e9 to the story of one man\u2019s personal apocalypse. With the love and support of his wife, Ashley, Harris struggles to overcome the difficulties of transitioning back to civilian life.<\/p>\n<p>In immense physical pain, Sergeant Harris grows addicted to his medication. His agony deepens as he attempts to reconcile the gulf between his experience of war and the terrifying normalcy of life at home. The two realities seamlessly intertwine to communicate both the extraordinary drama of war and, for a generation of soldiers, the no less shocking experience of returning home.<\/p>\n<p>Half startlingly raw war documentary and half intimate portrait of a man in physical and spiritual agony, <em>Hell and Back Again<\/em> has been nominated for the 2012 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>The Filmmaker<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Danfung Dennis<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Since 2006, Danfung Dennis has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His still photographs have been published in <i>Newsweek<\/i>, <i>TIME<\/i>, <i>The New York Times<\/i>, <i>The Washington Post<\/i>, <i>The Guardian<\/i>, <i>Rolling Stone<\/i>, <i>Le Figaro Magazine<\/i>, <i>Financial Times Magazine<\/i>, <i>Mother Jones<\/i>, <i>Der Spiegel<\/i>, and <i>The Wall Street Journal<\/i>. PBS&#8217;s FRONTLINE opened its 2009 fall feature program, <i>Obama&#8217;s War<\/i> using Danfung Dennis&#8217;s footage. The immersive nature of the footage prompted a flurry of comment and inquiry from the Pentagon, the White House, veterans groups, and viewers. Subsequently, the program was nominated for a 2010 Emmy Award. In 2010, Dennis won the Bayeux-Calvados Award For War Correspondents, was named one of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film by <i>Filmmaker Magazine<\/i> and one of the 30 New and Emerging Photographers by <i>PDN Magazine<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sergeant Nathan Harris led a company of Marines in Southern Afghanistan against a Taliban stronghold. But while war against a ghostlike enemy is unpredictable and frustrating, coming home can be the most unsettling journey of all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":10010,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1225,1258],"class_list":["post-255","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-politics-and-government","topic-war-military"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Hell and Back Again | Oscar-Nominated Documentary | Independent Lens | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Hell and Back Again is an Oscar-nominated documentary on the chaos of war and the terrifying task of coming home again.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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