Just in time for Veterans Day, the trailer is up for an Orange filmmaker's documentary that took him to the front lines in Iraq and back to capture American military veterans-turned-humanitarians.
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The Longest Road, which is scheduled to premiere on the film festival circuit early next year, took Chapman University alum Matthew Charles Hall to the Northern Iraqi region known as Kurdistan, where there are currently 2 million refugees who have been displaced by the terrorist regime Daesh, better known as ISIS.
Hall and co-director Jennifer Salcido, a Lompoc resident who had taught at the University of Dohuk in Iraqi Kurdistan, actually volunteered to helm the documentary at their own cost. The first-time documentarians were inspired by the Kurdish proverb that translates to, “A good companion shortens the longest road,” Hall explains. Here is their trailer:
The film focuses mostly on 63-year-old Richard Campos, a retired Marine who struggled back home in Stockton after serving in the Iraq War. In an effort to snap out of it, he focuses on those he left behind–not his fellow service members but the people who have been living with war in the region through two American presidencies (so far).
“Using funds from his own pocket, Campos has assembled a team of humanitarians and documentarians to run humanitarian missions to the Middle East in an effort to aid Iraqi and Syrian refugees living in the shadow of ISIS,” Hall says. “His exploits took him throughout the region and to the front lines of combat where Peshmerga forces battle ISIS on a weekly basis.”
Combining interviews with survivors and military professionals and footage directly from the front lines of combat, the feature-length documentary from Hall's Hall Legacy company will seek worldwide distribution after its early 2016 run at film festivals, he says.
Follow The Longest Road's progress at facebook.com/longestroadmovie.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.