Dom grows disillusioned as he serves his country in Afghanistan (photo by Heather Courtney)
DOCUMENTARY FORTNIGHT 2013 — MOMA’S INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF NONFICTION FILM AND MEDIAWHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM (Heather Courtney, 2011)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, March 2, 2:00
Festival runs February 27 – March 4
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.wheresoldierscomefrom.com
Returning to her small hometown of Hancock in Northern Michigan, documentarian Heather Courtney (Letters from the Other Side) wanted to make a film about the Upper Peninsula area and its residents, and she came up with quite a story. For several years, Courtney followed a group of young men who had enlisted in the National Guard because they either didn’t have enough money for college or didn’t know what else to do with their lives; she then traveled with them as they got called up and sent to fight the war in Afghanistan. Dominic Fredianelli, Cole Smith, and Matt “Bodi” Beaudoin never fully considered what they were getting into when they signed up; they clearly did not join up merely for patriotic reasons, so it doesn’t take long before they start questioning what America is doing over there. The three men, along with their families back home, allowed Courtney remarkable access, holding nothing back as they share their bittersweet emotions, their politics, their fears, and their overwhelming confusion. The men’s National Guard unit is assigned to an IED sweeper team that goes out in heavily protected vehicles, searching for and detonating hidden improvised explosive devices, but even carefully monitored explosions take their toll on the soldiers, not to mention the surprise bombs that nearly blow them to pieces. Courtney, who served as producer, director, cinematographer, and coeditor, does not add any voice-over narration or accumulate facts and statistics; instead, she lets the story tell itself, avoiding propaganda and grand statements. At first it is hard to have much sympathy for Dom, Cole, and Bodi, who should have thought a lot more about their decision to join the National Guard, but as they and their families get more deeply involved in the war, Where Soldiers Come From grows ever-more poignant and frightening. Where Soldiers Come From is screening at MoMA on March 2 at 2:00 as part of the “MoMA Selects: POV” section of “Documentary Fortnight 2013: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media”; the POV portion, which runs February 27 to March 4, celebrates a quarter-century of the award-winning PBS program POV and also includes such films as Marco Williams and Whitney Dow’s Two Towns of Jasper, Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie Galloway’s Better This World, Marshall Curry’s If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, and Laurel Chiten’s Twitch and Shout. “POV films and filmmakers have been at the center of a golden age of documentary filmmaking,” POV executive producer Simon Kilmurry explained in a statement. “The films in MoMA’s special program not only look back at the first twenty-five years of POV but also look forward. Collectively, they illustrate how vibrant and essential documentaries have become in exploring the human experience.”