http://www.bratsourjourneyhome.com/screenings.htm
"BRATS - Our Journey Home" is the first-ever documentary about us - about growing up BRAT - and how that has profoundly affected our lives.
Welcome to the official "BRATS Film Tour: Our Journey Home!" If you don't see your town on the tour schedule below, but think you have a large audience that wants to see the film, let us know and we'll do our best to accommodate you. Just so you know - we are scheduling additional dates, but we're only listing the confirmed screenings below!
If you are a community group, alumni organization, educational institution, or other group who would like to organize a screening, drop us a line and we'll see what we can do. The director and some of the cast are available for public appearances. You can also purchase an institutional copy of the film to show to a large group, but you can't charge for attendance. Please contact us about specific rights.
Link to view the trailer or listen to a radio interview,
http://www.bratsourjourneyhome.com/clips.htm
Upcoming BRATS FILM TOUR Dates
September 28, 2006
San Diego Film Festival, Pacific Gaslamp Theatre, 701 5th Ave., San Diego, CA (phone 619.232.0400) - 8:00 p.m. (may purchase tickets online or at the door)
September 29, 2006
Oceanside Public Library at the Civic Center, 330 N. Coast Highway, Oceanside, CA 92054 (760.435.5600) - 7:00 p.m. - sponsored by Friends of the Oceanside Public Library (FREE Screening)
October 7 and 8, 2006
Tacoma Film Festival, Performing Arts Auditorium, Stadium High School, 111 N. E Street, Tacoma, WA 98405 (253.571.1325) - Saturday 10/7 at 7:00 p.m., Sunday 10/8 at 2:00 p.m. (tickets on sale at The Grand Cinema, 606 S. Fawcett, Tacoma, WA 98402)
October 25 and 29, 2006
Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, Malco Theater, 819 Central Avenue, Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas 71901 (501.321.4747) - 10/25 at 5:05 p.m., Sunday 10/29 at 2:00 p.m. (tickets available at door)
October 22, 2006
Academy Women's Symposium - Arlington, VA (private screening)
October 27 and 28, 2006
Overseas Brats "Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati Gathering" - The Drawbridge Inn, 2477 Royal Drive, Ft. Mitchell, KY - Friday 10/27 at 10:30 a.m., Saturday 10/28 at 3:00 p.m.
November 2, 2006
Colorado Springs Community Screening - Time and location to be announced!
November 3, 2006
Peterson Air Force Base Screening - Time and location to be announced!
November 3-5, 2006
Rocky Mountain Women's Film Festival, Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, 30 West Dale Street, Colorado Springs, CO 80903 (719.634.5581) - Time and date to be announced!
November 6, 2006
Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, Cinema Paradiso, 503 SE 6th Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL (in the heart of downtown, on the south side of the New River) - 6:00 p.m. - (purchase tickets at door or online)
What people are saying about the movie:
'We must aggressively support this film."
John Hardy, Air Force Brat, Producer "Sex Lives and Video Tape" "Erin Brockovitch" "Ocean's 11" "Ocean's 12"
" It was the most wonderful trip HOME!"
Katie Villlani, Navy Brat
"The first true, sometimes brutally raw telling of the lives of dependents... should be classified as required viewing."
-Steve Eisenbaugh, CIA Brat, Taipei American School
Let's support this film and fill the house.
Q & A session with writer-director Donna Musil follows each screening.
Questions? Call Tim Wurtz - 310-914-1702
Short Synopsis
U.S. military BRATS share intimate memories about their unique childhoods - growing up on military bases around the world, then struggling to fit into an American lifestyle with which they have little in common. Narrated and featuring songs by Kris Kristofferson. Interviews include General Norman Schwarzkopf.
Medium version Synopsis
It's hard to imagine a military BRAT'S childhood. Moving from base to base around the world, they are at home everywhere - and nowhere. There are 1.2 million children being raised in the military today. An estimated 15 million Americans are former BRATS. They include actors Jessica Alba and Robert Duvall, Senator John McCain, and basketball star Shaquille O'Neal.
BRATS is the first cinematic glimpse into a global subculture whose journey to adulthood is a high-octane mixture of incredible excitement and enormous pain. Make no mistake - BRATS is not about the U.S. military - it's about their children, who grow up in a paradox that is idealistic and authoritarian, privileged and perilous, supportive and stifling - all at the same time. Their passports say "United States," but they're really citizens of the world.
Singer/songwriter and Air Force brat Kris Kristofferson leads us through the heart of their experiences, sharing intimate memories with fellow BRATS, including General Norman Schwarzkopf and author Mary Edwards Wertsch. Their stories reveal the peculiar landscape of their childhood, the culture that binds them together, and the power it exerts over their lives.
A seven-year work of passion by independent filmmaker Donna Musil, BRATS features rare archival footage, home movies and private photographs from post-war Japan, Germany, and Vietnam.
Longer version of synopsis
BRATS: Our Journey Home is the first feature-length documentary, narrated by singer/songwriter Kris Kristofferson, about a hidden American subculture - a lost tribe of at least fifteen million people from widely diverse backgrounds, raised on military bases around the world, whose shared experiences have shaped their lives so powerfully, they are forever different from their fellow Americans.
Using archival film sources, home movie footage and provocative first-person interviews, including General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, author Mary Edwards Wertsch, psychotherapist Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, and West Point sociologist Dr. Morten Ender, BRATS tells the story of children raised under a very unique set of circumstances, including:
* living on the edge of history-in-the-making - attending the Nuremberg Trials and studying in the shadows of Dachau and Hiroshima;
* growing up in integrated schools and neighborhoods 20 years before the civil rights movement took hold in America;
* moving around the world, rarely knowing one's extended family, and losing one's friends, identity, and social status every couple of years;
* living on a series of "hometown" military bases with no permanent members, often in the middle of foreign countries;
* living an almost socialistic existence under an authoritarian structure that espouses democracy;
* suffering the prolonged absence of one's father (or more recently, one's mother or both);
* growing up in a patriarchal society constantly preparing for war; and,
* being exposed to art, history, and culture most American children only read about.
This unusual combination of experiences has created a cultural identity so powerful, it crosses all lines of race, gender, age, and class. Most brats, however, don't even know they belong to a separate subculture - they just feel "different" somehow, from their fellow Americans. Then the Internet surfaced a few years ago, enabling many to reconnect, reunite, and compare notes.
The similarities they've discovered are astounding - from seemingly innocuous personality quirks to major values, choices, expectations about life. Some of these psychological legacies are inspiring, others bittersweet. But for many, reconnecting with their fellow brats and recognizing their unique heritage has been the first time they've felt like they belonged, the first "hometown" they've ever known - each other.
As author and Marine Corps brat Pat Conroy says so eloquently in his introduction to Mary Wertsch's book, Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress:
I thought I was singular in all this, one of a kind. From Mary's book I discover that I speak in the multitongued, deep-throated voice of my tribe. ...[I]t's a language I was not even aware I spoke... a secret family I did not know I had. ... Military brats, my lost tribe, spent their entire youth in service to this country, and no one even knew we were there.
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