Presenting Princess Shaw — The Amazing True Story of a Collaboration that Reached Across the Globe
Posted on May 31, 2016 at 8:39 am
Anything you put online — a tweet, a video, a blog post — is like a message in a bottle. You never know where it will end up and who will find it.
Princess Shaw is the stage name of a New Orleans-based singer known by day as Samantha Montgomery, who cares for the elderly. By night, she writes and sings her own songs on her confessional YouTube channel.
On the other side of the world, Ophir Kutiel is an Israeli artist who creates video mash ups of amateur YouTube performers. He, too, has a stage name — he is known as Kutiman and he is a composer, a musician, and a pioneering video artist. He saw Princess Shaw’s videos and he used one to build a song. A new documentary called “Presenting Princess Shaw” shows how Kutiman developed Princess Shaw’s work to create something magical.
I’ve already written about great documentaries and feature films about the military to watch on Memorial Day. These recent documentaries about our 21st century conflicts give the military a chance to tell their own story. They are not pro-war or anti-war. They are pro-soldier.
The War Tapes Operation Iraqi Freedom was filmed by three soldiers on the front lines in 2006.
Restrepo This documentary tells the story of the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. The movie focuses on a remote 15-man outpost, “Restrepo,” named after a platoon medic who was killed in action.
Gunner Palace This film shows us the lives of soldiers from the 2/3 Field Artillery in a bombed-out former pleasure palace once belonging to Uday Hussein.
Bomb Hunters: Afghanistan The US Army’s 23rd Engineer Company is are charged with clearing routes in southern Afghanistan and disarming the military’s number one threat: IEDs.
Always Faithful Military dog teams are on the front lines of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Always Faithful” follows five young Marines and their four-legged partners.
Baghdad ER Like a real-life update on the kinds of facilities portrayed in “MASH,” this film looks at life and death at the 86th Combat Support Hospital, the U.S. Army’s premier medical facility in Iraq.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, affects almost 30 percent of the 834,467 Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans treated through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Consumed by anger and traumatic memories long after their return, soldiers often resort to drugs or suicide to end their suffering.
Filmmaker Laurent Bécue-Renard provides a searing account of how the disorder has affected veterans and their families in Of Men and War. The film offers an unparalleled look at the enduring consequences of PTSD and the role treatment can play in helping soldiers reclaim their lives. An Official Selection of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, the documentary has its national broadcast premiere during the 29th season of POV(Point of View)on Memorial Day, Monday, May 30, 2016 at 10 p.m. on PBS. (Check local listings.)
Of Men and War, made between 2003 and 2014, begins with a scenic drive through California’s Napa Valley, where therapist and social worker Fred Gusman, who pioneered revolutionary PTSD programs at the Veterans Administration in the late 1970s, opened The Pathway Home residential treatment center in Yountville in 2008. The beauty of the surroundings stands in stark contrast to the intense inner turmoil suffered by the veterans arriving by van.
Bécue-Renard filmed the servicemen speaking for the first time about their experiences. Survival in a war zone required a hardened attitude—“Rage and anger carried me through everything,” says one veteran—accompanied by alienation even from those in their units. “He was there and then he was gone,” a soldier says of a friend killed during their deployment together in Iraq. “It’s hard being close to anybody because you know they’re going to leave any time.” These attitudes did not disappear when combat tours ended.
“The return to civilian life is not what they thought it would be,” says Gusman, Pathway’s lead therapist. One veteran says that he “woke up mad” and “took things out” on loved ones. “When you come back you feel like you should have died over there. It would have been a hell of a lot easier to just fall down over there and not get back up.” Something as ordinary as driving can cause severe distress; in the combat zone, a soldier explains, an approaching vehicle was always seen as potentially carrying a bomb. That fear returns if a car pulls too close to his in traffic.
The war resurfaces in nightmares and panic attacks. A sudden noise might trigger a flashback. Other times, all it takes is a disagreement with a spouse or an ambiguous look from a stranger. Then the groundswell takes over—all that was buried from the war boils up, and the veteran lashes out. “The day I came home from Iraq was the last time I saw my daughter,” says one soldier. “I was given a restraining order.”
The film underscores another problem: Seeking help for PTSD can be a difficult step to take. “What we have is embarrassing,” a soldier says. It makes him feel “small” and “defective.” Wives and girlfriends often feel helpless. “I’m scared he’s going to give up trying,” says one.
Bécue-Renard says his camera performed a significant role in the soldiers’ therapy. “They came to perceive the filming itself as an additional glimmer of hope. Consciously or not, the veterans began to sense that voicing their brutal experiences might uncover deeper meaning: Their stories might contribute to a greater public consciousness of the hardships veterans confront long after the war’s end.”
Of Men and War shows that for many veterans, recovery will be a lengthy process. Although therapists cite the necessity of forgiveness, one soldier, who killed a colleague by mistake, responds, “I think it would be really selfish for me to learn to forgive myself.”
“Of Men and War came out of a reflection on what was left unspoken by my grandfathers,” says Bécue-Renard. “They had died by the time I was born—but they had also staunchly refused to talk about their experiences from the First World War while they were alive. Of Men and War is my way of honoring them.
“It took 11 years between my first idea for the film—when the Iraq war began in 2003—and its completion in May 2014. I spent 14 months in the therapy center and returned many times in the four years that followed. Filming therapy was a way of acknowledging people who had decided to move forward with their lives. Some days I’d leave the therapy room overwhelmed. How was I to make sense out of this mess? How could I communicate it to an audience? I became convinced that from all this mud, I could eke out rays of light. In doing so, I could find meaning for the protagonists in Of Men and War as well as for its viewers.”
And yet the phrase uses — “Then the problem is you” — feels both wrong and unfair. Because the problem is not just Jeanie. It’s also an entire community who wants to “save Ferris” when he isn’t even in peril and doesn’t notice that Jeanie — and other marginalized kids like her — need attention too. Maybe Hughes wasn’t trying to slyly satirize a society that always gives white guys the advantages and the benefit of the doubt, but man, it really is hard to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off 30 years later and not see it that way.
Operation Iraqi Freedom was filmed by three soldiers on the front lines in 2006.
This documentary tells the story of the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. The movie focuses on a remote 15-man outpost, “Restrepo,” named after a platoon medic who was killed in action.
This film shows us the lives of soldiers from the 2/3 Field Artillery in a bombed-out former pleasure palace once belonging to Uday Hussein.
The US Army’s 23rd Engineer Company is are charged with clearing routes in southern Afghanistan and disarming the military’s number one threat: IEDs.
Military dog teams are on the front lines of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Always Faithful” follows five young Marines and their four-legged partners.
Like a real-life update on the kinds of facilities portrayed in “MASH,” this film looks at life and death at the 86th Combat Support Hospital, the U.S. Army’s premier medical facility in Iraq.