Coming to theatres today, Friday, November 6: OF MEN AND WAR
Laurent Bécue-Renard’s candid portrait of veterans struggling with PTSD made its bow at Cannes last year. Since then, it has screened at IDFA, Göteborg, DocPoint, Documentary Fortnight, ZagrebDox, True/False, Full Frame, Visions du Réel, Documenta Madrid, San Francisco, DOXA, Sydney, AFI Docs, Human Rights Watch, and DOK.Fest Munich, among others.
Bécue-Renard’s second film in a planned trilogy dubbed “Genealogy of Wrath” takes an intimate, difficult look at war-scarred US vets who are receiving group therapy at The Pathway Home, a Northern Californian treatment center catering to service members. A carefully-measured work filmed over five years, which incorporates nine months of nearly daily recording sessions at Pathway, the doc captures the frustration, anger, and recurring trauma its subjects are facing after tours of duty in Iraq. Bécue-Renard confines his footage to the present-day, avoiding combat scenes that might typically be used to illustrate his subjects’ harrowing tales to instead force the viewer to focus on the men themselves, and to really hear from them the impact of their experiences, unmediated. Offering no false happy endings, the film instead presents the realities of combat and its aftermath, for both the soldiers and those in their lives.
what (not) to doc 