In Country

IN COUNTRY is an immersive feature documentary about a platoon of soldiers who are recreating the Vietnam War in the woods of Oregon. Weaving together verite footage of the reenactments with flashbacks to the characters’ real lives and unseen archival footage from the Vietnam War, IN COUNTRY blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, past and present to tell a story about the lives of soldiers and the act of remembering. The question at the center of IN COUNTRY is why? Why would these men -- many of them combat veterans of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, still haunted by their own experiences on the front-line-- try to recreate a war that so many Americans have tried to forget?The story is told through the characters, and like any war film it is an ensemble cast: Doc, a charismatic African-American medic haunted by two tours in Iraq; Bummy, a Vietnam veteran who found the group while searching for his old war buddies online; Tuna, an adrenaline junkie just back from Iraq and preparing to leave for Afghanistan; and Vinh, a 60 year-old former South Vietnamese soldier, still fighting Communism 36 years later.In the end, IN COUNTRY is not just about the aftermath of the Vietnam War or the fantasies of grown men; it is a meditation on how the drums of war continue to draw men to battle despite devastating consequences.