FARMER/VETERAN

Filmmaker's note

As civilians, we’re part of an increasingly large divide in the perception of who goes into combat and how the legacy of their experience lives on. We may thank them for their service, but we often fail to accept and understand them as they are. In Alex Sutton we encountered a harder, messier truth of how our growing civilian-military disconnect can play out on the other side of that divide. We originally set out to explore the therapeutic potential of agriculture for wounded combat veterans. We met Alex and he was in love—with beginning his farm and with his girlfriend Jessica. That love was contagious and we were excited to tell a story of new purpose and healing; however, as the seasons changed, Alex could not keep ahead of the work or his own demons. Mental health professionals we consulted with cautioned us that recovery from trauma is painfully slow and non-linear, but there was something else impeding our ability to connect with Alex’s experience. His stories of the past contradicted with his military records and with his own physical body. Our focus soon shifted to understanding why. The stories we tell ourselves hold a powerful place in trauma recovery—for better or worse. So we made room for Alex’s own complicated truth and came to understood far more in return. We believe that by experiencing the nature of one veteran’s struggle up close, they can become more relatable across the civilian-military divide. We want this film call out to our social responsibility to Alex—to all veterans returning home—to share in the burden of the long after war. We do this by making time and space to receive their stories, compassionately meeting them wherever they are in their journey.