Getting to the Heart of a Decade-long Saga
EDITOR AMY FOOTE HELPS DUO OF JOURNALISTS-TURNED-FILMMAKERS TELL THE STORY OF DOC ‘FATHER SOLDIER SON’
TO GET TO THE CENTER of the story of documentary “Father Soldier Son,” about a single dad raising two boys while fighting in Afghanistan, editor Amy Foote locked herself in a bubble for two months poring over 10 years of footage. Journalists-turned-filmmakers Catrin Einhorn and Leslye Davis make their feature debut with the doc, now streaming on Netflix. In 2010, Einhorn produced the New York Times documentary short “A Year at War,” in which reporter James Dao follows a regiment of soldiers being deployed to Afghanistan. Among them was single dad Brian Eisch, a platoon sergeant and third-generation soldier. Fascinated by his story, she went to Wisconsin, where Eisch’s sons, 12-yearold Isaac and 7-year-old Joey, had moved when Eisch went off to war, to live with his older brother, Sean. “And that’s how it started,” Einhorn says. Foote — whose diverse work on documentaries include Staples Singers celebration “Mavis,” History Channel’s “Watergate” and the sociopolitical “Hail Satan?” — joined the project after everything had been shot. “It was the most amount of footage I ever had to contend with,” she says. “[Einhorn and Davis] had been there the whole time and were much further ahead.” When Foote caught up with the directors, they all compared notes to see if they saw the same story points, and conversations began about carving out a narrative. “We storyboarded the scenes we wanted to work on cutting,” Foote says. The doc follows Eisch as he returns home after a serious gunshot injury to his leg years earlier, which now requires amputation. He tries to make sense of the injury, and the family grapples with the long-term effects of military service, including an exploration of the depression he now suffers from. A big challenge was finding the key images for the opening scene. Early footage from 2010 existed in short multimedia clips that lasted 10 to 15 minutes. “I went through everything they had shot from those early years,” Foote says.
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CONSOLATA BOYLE
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