Be Home Soon: Letters From My Grandfather

Be Home Soon: Letters from My Grandfather is an intimate personal documentary about war and faith, love and loss, family myth and legacy - based on cards and letters my family received from my grandfather during WWII.  An Episcopal priest, my grandfather volunteered to be a Chaplain with the 200th Coast Artillery National Guard Unit in the Philippines. The unit left on a train from Ft. Bliss, Texas on the last day of August 1941. My grandfather left behind his wife and three young sons (my father Teddy who was eight at the time, and his two brothers Alfred and John ages 6 and one month old).  Having survived the Bataan Death March, my grandfather died as a Japanese Prisoner of War at the Davao Penal Colony.

 

More poem than biopic or World War II documentary, Be Home Soon is a lyrical testament, which touches a universal nerve in its exploration of war and devotion -​

a meditation in motion on grace, memory and healing.​

 

​I use my grandfather’s letters as the film's structure, retracing his steps from his departure in Ft. Bliss, Texas to the Philippines. Combining my own documentary footage, and archival footage from WWII with letters, found footage and animations; the film is also a chronicle of my own journey of understanding family legacy, my pilgrimage — retracing his steps using his letters as my map.

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