Everybody with Angela Williamson is made possible by Fire Heart Entertainment and viewers like you.

Thank you.

To.

According to the National Veteran's Homeless Support Organization.

Military service can have a profound impact on family dynamics, influence in relationships, roles and routines within the family unit.

Tonight, we meet an award winning documentary filmmaker who has focused a spotlight on this issue.

In two films.

I'm so happy you're joining us.

And then you from Los Angeles.

This is Clark's PBS.

Welcome to everybody with Angela Williamson and Innovation, Arts, education and public affairs program.

Everybody, with Angela Williamson is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

I have two brothers serving in Iraq.

I think it's important for people in the military to have families, because it is a constant reminder to them of why they're doing what they're doing.

My brothers are putting their lives on the line.

Why are they doing it?

I need to know.

So I set off for Iraq to find the answers.

What's up?

I told you, I'm making.

I was anxious to get started.

Oh, let's go, rookie.

I admit I wanted to see life through their eyes.

When do you put your sunscreen on?

I never put any sunscreen on.

Really?

Okay.

Let people at home know we have got to make it seem worse than it really is.

It'll be a good experience.

Nothing too crazy that'll get you killed.

What I found was unlike anything I expected.

The three guys with working.

My understanding groove the tougher, uglier side of war that soldiers like my brothers know all too well.

Imagine, just like everyone in the house, fully geared up.

It's like the first.

I think he's changed.

Joe's always really afraid to argue with me or yell at me.

Now, whenever he gets mad, he just screams.

I expect you to fight.

Sometimes I'll flip through the pictures of my daughter.

My wife is sacrificing everything because he wants to make this world a better place for her to grow up in.

It's very different over there.

I mean.

It hurts a lot to lose a fellow soldier.

I don't know how we got my friends here.

Or closer.

Almost any friends I've ever had.

I don't know what's ahead.

I'm gonna come home.

And the one thing I'm going to want to do is hug her.

And she may not let me because she won't remember who I am.

However, we are going away.

These guys take you on as a brother.

They care about you.

Is it worth it if it cost your life?

I give my life for America any day.

Wouldn't think twice.

Whether.

Brother.

That trailer.

Wow.

What was some of the reasoning behind Brothers at War?

Well, it started with a desire to to tell my brother's story.

You know, they told me the whole truth wasn't coming out of Iraq.

And so I decided, I don't know why.

It's kind of crazy to to head overseas myself.

and embed with Isaac, on his third deployment.

And once I got there, he got me out to the Syrian border.

I got to meet a lot of the guys that served alongside him.

my youngest brother Joe said that wasn't enough.

So you seen the film that inspired me to go back again to the Sunni Triangle, and I did.

I got into the out with some snipers and while they were in combat, got out with the marine advisors and the Iraqi army experienced, decent amount of combat myself firsthand.

and in the course of making that film, got a much deeper understanding of what our service members go through, both on the war front but also when they come home.

And I think that's really interesting because you think some of your point of view has to do because these are not just brothers in the middle, but these are your brothers.

So how does family play into your point of view and telling this story?

Well, I think it gives the audience a lot of opportunities to laugh at my expense.

My brothers have no problem busting my chops.

so they keep it real.

and I think it's important for the audience to to see that and to enjoy that.

But it also makes the, the, the motivation behind the film so much deeper.

You know, when I made the first film, I thought it was for the reason I told you.

But the other reason was I felt a disconnect between myself and my two brothers who had served, and I wanted to cross that chasm.

And I think I was able to do that in the course of making the film.

And I think I've hit on something in that process that a lot of military families go through where somebody experiences traumatic incidents overseas or just really dynamic things that are hard to talk about or describe to people who've never been.

And it creates a barrier within military families.

And so I feel like the film has made some tough subjects on easier to talk about.

and that's been one of the greatest responses to the movie.

Well, and I think as a documentary filmmaker, it's all about the dialog that you start.

But then you've got to convey that story to the audience.

Do you think that was easier for you because you have the family connection, or do you think it was harder for you?

It was easier because when I got into the war zone, a couple things.

The other service members really responded to the fact that I was there to tell my brother's story.

They knew my motivation right away.

the other thing is, my brother said, listen to the soldiers.

Do what they tell you to do.

So I would do that, and the soldiers would respond to be like, oh, we got a genius here.

So all of a sudden they'd be like, hey, come over here.

I've had other journalists ask me, like, how did you get out with snipers?

I'm like, they asked me to go out with them.

So the opportunities just kept coming forward.

because of, you know, following the advice of my brothers.

And then everyone knew that I was there to tell my brother's story.

So I think it really helped, that film.

And I want to ask you this question, too, because, we have a kinship because we both do documentary films at a point during filming this documentary, did you start to feel the chills, like you knew that you were telling something bigger than what you set out to do?

Because I looked at that trailer.

It's bigger than the stories that are there.

There's so much to do.

There.

Yeah.

When I was walking down the road in Iraq and the, IED went off, and I, you know, brought my camera up, I was rolling, and then started to get shot at and was there, when guys were hurt and stuff like that.

I knew that, you know, that was all going to be in the film.

I knew that this was the climax of the film.

When I saw gunner, you know, say, if I die, if I fall down, I want you to keep fighting.

To the Iraqi soldiers.

I just knew I was witnessing something that was bigger than me.

another moment that really struck me was I was out the Syrian border.

I was 120 degrees outside and Chris McKay was saying, you know, I'd give him, you know, I'm here for America.

I'm here for my, you know, and I said it just I don't know what inspired me to say maybe I was hot or tired.

And I was like, what if you lose your life?

And he paused and he thought deeply for a minute, and he said, I'd give my life for America any day.

Wouldn't think twice.

And it just struck me.

It just hit my heart.

And I knew I was onto something that was, like you said, bigger than myself.

And you see that start to come to life when you're in the post-production phase and you're putting everything together, because now you've been on doing all of the shooting, you come home, you look at this footage, how does Jake put this together so that I what I've seen on this trailer impacts me so much.

It's hard not to get chills when I watch it.

I had a great editor, Bob Tamayo, and my producing partner and mentor, Norman Powell, was incredibly helpful.

you always want to tell as much as you can and share as much as you can and to get passionate about a subject, but at some point, you know, what he said to me is like, look, if we put a frame around the heart of the American soldier and tell their story, we'll have done a great thing.

And so I had to come to terms with that and let some of the other stuff go.

It became DVD extras, but I had to let it go because I had to have respect for the audience and allow them to go on an emotional journey with the course of the film and not try to cram everything that I learned into it.

And that's hard.

And it's very hard.

And then the next part comes the audience reaction.

So I have two questions for you.

The first one, your family's reaction.

And then the second one, the audience reaction.

So I wanted you to talk about that because this is personal for you.

Well, the first one was Isaac.

We allowed him to come out and see the film first.

He was very generous.

It was his unit I was embedding with.

It was his career on the line?

he came out and saw the film and we were all there and we're like, what'd you think?

And he was like, Ellen, what do you think?

And he was like, I think your brother wants to know what you think first.

he goes, can I have a moment?

Actually, I I'm so emotionally overwhelmed.

I love the film, but I need, like, five, ten minutes before I can talk about it.

We were like, okay.

Yeah, no.

No problem.

And and he loved it.

And, you know, he said, we're outside.

And he goes, well, I don't know if anybody else is going to like it, but I but I loved it, you know.

So that was everything to me because it was based on his willingness to open himself up to the movie and allow us in with all the people that he served alongside, that we got to make it.

So that was huge.

Mother, brother Joe, as you see in, you know, both films, he's he's he's cantankerous.

some things never change.

he didn't totally get there until we opened the movie in Columbus, Georgia.

And his.

It's very personal.

The things in the film between him and his fiancee at the time and film ends, Standing ovation.

Columbus, Georgia.

Heart of the Infantry.

And, he saw during the course of that that his fellow, snipers, infantrymen were not looking down at him or askance at him, but they actually were were love the film because it authentically told their story.

And from that moment on, he got it.

And this newest film we've just finished is he was the driving force behind that one.

He understood why it was so important to to have it made.

So it's it's an extraordinary experience.

First, when you have one brother who's been rooting for the project, have such an emotional response to it, but it's also very meaningful when the youngest one, who doesn't really get why we're doing this comes around.

It's always those younger ones, though.

But I mean, he saw it and he saw the impact.

And so my next question for you with the how did you know that you would start a second one?

Was it the audience's reaction or was it really family driven?

Well, it was twofold.

First of all, the first film evolved because of those opening nights.

Yes.

And because people were having first time conversations about their experiences overseas and Gold Star families were coming up to us and telling us it was helping them heal, to watch the film and get a better sense of where their loved one and drew their last breath.

So I created a journal to go along with the film.

Documentary filmmaker?

Yeah.

Showed it to Gary Sinise.

He loved it.

He goes, let's get it out there.

So he sponsored a five based military tour.

That was in 2011.

The response was extraordinary.

So that's evolved into this workshop that we do about 20 times a year.

We've done it for about 40,000 service members and their family members since 2011.

So that in the course of doing that workshop, I became curious about the friends I had made.

my new brothers, in a sense, and sisters that I, that I made in Iraq.

And I wanted to know how they were doing.

So I shot a little teaser.

I brought it to Gary Sinise.

He loved it.

And he said, look, we should we should do this film.

We should follow up with all these folks who you got to know in Iraq and see how they're doing now.

So why don't you just give us a little bit of a teaser of what our audience will be watching in this upcoming film?

Well, in Brothers After War, I returned to the scene of the crime, so to speak.

I return, 15 years later, to 12 war fighters to see how they're doing now.

And the film intercuts from moments in Iraq to 15 years later, and I ended up traveling the world to make the film.

I went to Italy, where my brother Joe was stationed.

I went to Tunisia with Isaac on his seventh and final deployment.

I go to Honduras with one of the vets.

I go up the eastern seaboard, I go to Las Vegas.

These folks are all over the country and the world, and I was able to follow up with them.

And I think one of the coolest things about the film is to to see if someone's thoughts and feelings about something have stayed the same, or have they changed 15 years later?

Hold that.

Hold on.

We'll be right back die.

So as a technical sergeant 80.

I served in Vietnam in 1969.

I am an U.S. Army veteran.

Have you ever helped a fellow veteran?

Of course.

Yes.

Try to always be there for each other.

I do my best reaching out to my brothers and sisters in arms.

Have you ever asked for help yourself?

it's always tough, right?

I, I can't say that I have.

I mean.

You don't have someone to kind of help you guide those thoughts.

It can be really bad.

Eventually, you know, you just can't deal with it on your own.

I guess it's part of the military, too, right?

Service before.

So it was drilled in service before self.

And you start to question.

Maybe people will be better off without me.

You know.

And you realize that you're not alone.

Once you take that first step, there's so much support.

Brothers at War makes the service member comfortable talking about it, while the family member sitting there watching it with them.

And sometimes you almost feel like your hand is is hijacking your mind, and you're actually starting to be more honest than you have any point.

So even if just a couple of sentences or a phrase, it pulls something out of you that just either talking about it with a chaplain or with anybody doesn't seem to do.

help and say, hey, there's all these programs for them to reach out and get help for.

And they failed to reach out.

Not everybody's built to reach out.

Sometimes you have to reach in.

human being, when you can cry and when you can cry out for help, or when you can just talk to somebody.

That that's a good thing, you know, that helps.

Welcome back.

That trailer.

Wow.

I mean, now you're seeing those faces again.

But there's stories.

There's more depth to them.

Right.

So how do you approach that to tell the same story, but also giving your audience a new perspective?

You know, we found this film was more complicated.

It's a much tougher subject matter when you start looking at veterans coming home from war and what their experiences have been.

In a sense, we sort of told the story of one veteran through 12 different veterans, really.

and so how do you keep that one story?

The same with 12 different voices?

Well, what I mean by that is we were careful not to repeat any subject matter.

you know, my my brothers kind of bookend the film.

we start with Isaac and his daughter, when he comes home from war and his daughter doesn't recognize him.

And then we cut to see them years later.

and he, you know, he gets emotional.

He actually cries a little bit, which is very rare for him, because he says it takes six months to be dad again.

and we end the film with with Joe and Isaac as well.

And in the middle, we we go and meet up with, ten different veterans, that I got to know in Iraq that I, that are close friends of mine.

Now.

And I will tell you that that was actually one of the most challenging parts of, making the film was recording those stories and knowing the right moment to come into a story and out of the story, some of it I knew before I even started filming.

I had a vision, but a lot of it, it was refined.

And Gary Sinise was our executive producer, and I let him see the film before anybody else.

And about ten minutes into it, he said, I'm really glad the Foundation decided to do this.

So I was like, oh, thank God, because not everybody's going to enjoy my sense of humor.

But he does.

and then he then worked with me for about 9 to 10 months to recut the film.

We screened it for veteran audiences, we screen it for civilian audiences.

We got feedback.

And so I think we really created an experience for an audience member where there's humor, often at my expense.

there is drama.

There is something that's interesting.

The film doesn't repeat itself, because we really want to reward an audience member for coming to learn about our veterans and give them a sense of, you know, an enjoyable experience while they go on that journey.

so, yeah, it was it was, it was a, you know, we've put about four years into making Brothers After War.

Well, and you can tell when you see that trailer and, and I want to watch the movie now, I don't want to wait and talking about waiting and because of that first documentary is when you started these programs.

So this new documentary will be part of that program as well.

Correct.

So tell us a, I don't even remember if we talked about the name of the program because I think our audience, I know our audience will want to know that too.

Well, the Brothers at War Workshop, we've been doing, primarily with the military and National Guard and on military bases.

I just did one, two days ago.

you know, we've been doing that.

We do that about 20 times a year.

We'll continue to do that.

That's corporals and captains dealing with deployments and coming home and their families.

My, you know, my sister in laws are in that film.

The new film, Brothers After War is really about the veterans experience.

So the corporals are now master sergeants, the captains now lieutenant colonel.

And then some of the folks we follow up with are out of the military, and they're into their civilian lives.

So it's really a deep dive into that experience.

I would say that the experience of doing the workshops really kind of allowed me to know where to look, you know, where to dig in.

it really prepped me for this film.

I didn't know that suicide was going to be such a topic that was going to come up.

I actually got kind of surprised by it with a couple of my friends being, having dealt with that, I've come to learn that about 1 in 3 veterans thinks about suicide at some time.

and then, you know, a lot of the.

Deep stuff in the movie, in the movie just sort of came out.

And there's also a lot of solution in the film.

So I think the film for veterans offers an opportunity to look at and relate to another veteran facing one of the obstacles of coming home from war or reintegrating into society.

But there's also a ton of solution.

You know, one of the veterans, gunner, was kind of quickly going through this conversation about this, this moment of war.

And I said, well, I was there.

And for me, it was grace on earth.

The way you touch that Iraqi's face.

And he then revisited that moment in his mind, and he started to get emotional and we talked about it later and he said it was very healing.

It was a very it was catharsis to be able to go back through that and talk with somebody that was there, because this is usually I just brush through it.

But he actually thought about it and he said he was mine and he he cared about that person.

And it was an intimate connection he had with him.

And I think a lot of people don't understand that.

They don't understand that that war bonds these men and women together so tightly, and when they lose someone, it's a traumatic incidents like losing your own brother, your own sister.

And if we don't understand where they are, how can we welcome them home?

How can we wrap our arms around him?

So my biggest hope for the film is it allows our audience members to truly understand veterans and their life experience a little deeper, so that they can reconnect with them and even a more meaningful way.

Well, I think it's something you said it was actually in the first segment that shocked me was with the first documentary, Brothers at War.

You had our military brothers and sisters telling you, well, now we're talking about that.

And you, your documentary came out in the 2000.

And so with Brothers After War, isn't that it felt that the first documentary was to educate us as civil as to what our military goes to that brothers, after war, I feel that that's so that we start to understand.

So we have a different view of how we work with our military coming home.

Am I understanding your big picture here?

And if not, you can correct me?

No, it's 100% the case.

You know, this is an insider's look.

You know, I was able to ask questions that other people might not be able to ask because I was there with them.

You know, I was there and experienced the same combat moments and the same danger.

And that allowed me to go a little deeper, maybe with my questions and ask things that other people might find taboo to talk about.

And they also know we're doing these workshops.

So they would go there because they thought it might be more beneficial, more helpful to, you know, open up and share something of their own life.

Even my brother Joe gets very, authentic in the film, gives, you know, talks a lot about stuff.

And he says, if what if me telling you my story can help another veteran.

That's why I'm doing this.

So yes, the film absolutely does a deep dive into this experience with full knowledge that the film will be used as a jumping off point for other veterans to journal and talk about their own experience, and we've already seen that happen.

We've already finished the the pilot program for brothers after movie and seminar experience.

The film got a standing ovation by even Vietnam veterans, hundreds of Vietnam veterans standing ovation.

And then after the film were seen, veterans open up and talk about the difficulty of coming home, talking about things that they've done, like maybe talk to the counselor at the VA to help get through some of that and get to a better life.

And the film also has a lot of solution and a lot of, success as well.

You know, Ben Fisher's, you know, a soldier who's experienced combat like everybody else, but he's someone who's gone on, he's become a business owner.

and is is married and very happy and having a great life.

but he didn't get there with a snap of the fingers.

He had to go through all the trials and tribulations of.

Of what all of other service members go through when they come home.

And he he lays out that path in the film.

And I think that's very valuable for our veterans to to hear and see.

I think that's so important because you've also mentioned several times while you're telling the story, the importance of showing our military brothers and sisters how to journal so they know that their stories are impactful, because that's a lot of times they don't feel that we understand what they went through, but that journaling does help, right?

Absolutely.

Journaling is an ancient warrior technique.

Marcus Aurelius used to journal Julius Caesar.

It goes back, you know, thousands of years.

It's a way that, warriors have made sense of their experiences.

And there's some good science behind this as well.

it's also a great starting point, because you can do that kind of privately and get introspective.

And sometimes your hand will surprise you with what you're writing down.

It also is great preparation to then tell your story.

And when you're telling your story, you're processing your experience and you're starting to make sense of it.

You also are instead of pushing a family member away, you're pulling them in.

Oh, so you're relieving pressure on yourself in that conversation, but you're also giving so much more understanding for a family member and allowing them to understand, you know, why are you jumping if there's a loud noise or kids screaming or crying, what is that moment?

Bring that back to you for?

And how can we, together as a family move forward?

So that's why I'm really passionate about the journaling and the conversation that these workshops engender, because I've seen firsthand the impact, you know, we've saved some lives because of it, but we've also had numerous, numerous people come to us and say it was the first step to saving our marriage because it starts opening up conversation.

It starts building community and communion.

between that service member and their immediate support system.

With everything that you're doing, how can our audience help support this new film?

They can go to Brothers After war.com and ask us to bring the film to them.

The Gary Sinise Foundation is passionate about bringing this film to wherever there's a community of veterans or community supporters that want to see it.

We are putting this in movie theaters because we want this to become a community building event.

So go to the Gary Sinise foundation.org or go to Brothers After War.

dot com and tell us how we can get the film to you and we will bring it to your community, and you can have an evening of celebration for the folks who, you know, after 911 and we lost 3000 souls in 30 minutes.

They said, never again will you knock our buildings down.

And these are the folks who went and fought for more than 20 years and defended the rest of us.

And this is their story.

Their story that needs to be told.

And you told it.

Thank you so much.

We'll make sure our audience has all of this information, and I cannot wait to watch this new film.

So thank you.

Thank you.

And thank you for joining us on everybody with Angela Williamson.

Viewers like you make this show possible.

Join us on social media to continue this conversation.

Good night and stay well.

Hi, I'm Angela Williamson, host of everybody with Angela Williamson.

Thank you for watching clicks.

If you enjoy my show, as well as all the other shows here on Cox, please consider supporting the station.

Your support helps keep all your favorite programs available.

You can support KLC us by calling 888998 clicks or by visiting KLC us dawg.