Almost Sunrise (2017)

This PBS documentary film is part of their "Point of View" series.  It debuted at the Telluride Film Festival in May of 2016, then was shown on PBS in November 2017, and subsequently made available on the PBS website. As a sort of cinéma vérité, it tells the stories of Tom Voss and Anthony Anderson, two veterans of the Iraq War, who walked 2,700 miles in 155 days from Milwaukee to Los Angeles. This is not a film about the physical, emotional, or even psychological traumas of war (like PTSD), but, as we learn in the very first frame of the film, a pilgrimage in search of healing for the moral injuries of war — that is, "a wound to the soul, caused by participation in events that violate one's deeply held sense of right and wrong." The film draws upon interviews with family members, fellow vets, and health care providers, along with graphic footage from Iraq. The movie ends at a Benedictine monastery in Colorado, where the Trappist monk Thomas Keating suggests the need for forgiveness, of yourself and even of God. For a book version of this theme, see David Wood, What Have We Done; The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2016).