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Catrin Einhorn and Leslye Davis didn’t set out to make a feature film.
Ms. Einhorn and Ms. Davis, two New York Times journalists, started following the family of Sgt. First Class Brian Eisch, a single father deployed to Afghanistan, with one goal in mind: to show the ripple effects of his service on him and his family. It started 10 years ago, when Sergeant Eisch was still serving overseas in America’s longest war, when his sons, Isaac and Joey, were, respectively, 12 and 7 years old.
That initial story on the Eisch family from Ms. Einhorn, a reporter, and James Dao, then a military affairs correspondent, was published in 2010 as part of a multimedia series chronicling one Army battalion’s yearlong deployment in Afghanistan. But as Ms. Einhorn and, starting in 2014, Ms. Davis, a video journalist, continued to follow up with the family, it became clear that there was still much of their story left to tell.
“We stuck with the story because we simply had to,” Ms. Einhorn said. “It kept going in so many surprising directions. Over the years it became obvious that we were going to need more of a feature-length amount of time to tell this story in the right way.”
And so the Eisch family’s story grew into a full-length documentary, “Father Soldier Son” — an intimate film that bears witness to 10 years of joy and tragedy, that explores how one man’s call to serve influences his sons’ beliefs and values. The documentary, directed and produced by Ms. Davis and Ms. Einhorn and presented by The New York Times, premieres Friday on Netflix. A Times interactive photo essay on the story also appears online Friday, and a 72-page special section will follow in print over the weekend.
“The gathering of the material just felt like a more in-depth version of what we normally do,” Ms. Einhorn said. “But taking many months to sit and construct something at this scale was really different and exciting.”
The film largely focuses on the Eisch boys and the ways their father’s service shapes them: Isaac, the eldest, grows into a teenager grappling with his future and whether a military career or college is the best path. Joey joins the wrestling team at school, following in his father’s footsteps, and has his heart set on joining the Army.
“They were just remarkably open, very vulnerable, very good at communicating how they felt, and I think that we were specifically drawn to them,” Ms. Davis said.
The frequency of the filmmakers’ visits with the family varied. Ms. Einhorn and Ms. Davis sometimes planned trips around certain events they wanted to capture, like wrestling tournaments or family fishing outings. Other visits were open-ended with no agenda or scene in mind, in hopes of documenting the family’s more intimate moments in times of hardship — Ms. Davis spent a lot of time filming Sergeant Eisch after a major surgery in 2014. The Eisch home was only a six-hour drive away in upstate New York, giving the journalists the flexibility to visit more often.
The biggest challenge in creating the film, Ms. Davis said, was witnessing some of the more emotional scenes. But one of the hardest tasks, in general, with a documentary — especially one that is filmed over 10 years — can be gaining the trust it takes to capture those unguarded moments. In the case of the Eisch family, Ms. Davis said, that confidence in the filmmakers was earned when the first story on the family was published a decade ago.
“I think seeing the end result of really rigorous fact-checking and accurate reporting that reflected back to them what they had seen in their own lives gave them a sense of trust that was pretty unique,” Ms. Davis said. “Just being there, and them getting used to us being in their lives to the point that they forgot about us, allowed us to film in the vérité way we did.”
Although they still had to balance their work on the documentary with other projects, the filmmakers found it refreshing, as journalists, to focus so intently on one story.
“Getting to have our brains in one story for an extended period of time was really a privilege,” Ms. Davis said. “It was also really invigorating. It reminded you of the days in journalism school and how fun it was to just dive into someone else’s life and not be following the news so rapidly all the time.”
Because they were filming for so many years, there were many facets of the story that Ms. Einhorn and Ms. Davis had to weave into the film. There are layers of angles — of military culture, sacrifice, masculinity, the values that are learned and inherited. The film was intentionally edited in such a way, Ms. Davis said, that people will see those multiple threads and take away different things.
“As journalists, what we really want to do is show and not tell,” Ms. Einhorn said. “We hope our viewers will think about all those things and what they mean to them.”
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July 17, 2020 at 04:00PM
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