IF YOU CAN EVER GET BACK

Co-director & producer. Documentary feature. Premiered 2021.

IF YOU CAN EVER GET BACK, a feature-length documentary, tells the story of three US Army combat medics who served in Iraq’s “triangle of death.” Ten years later, they struggle to find their place in the civilian world and to lay to rest their wartime ghosts. 

Combat medics suffer especially high rates of PTSD, depression, and suicide, and the film explores their unique experiences in war and after war. By interweaving the every day and the extreme, the present and the past, the film offers an open-ended reflection on the moral, emotional, and existential consequences of war for those soldiers who must aid wounded enemy combatants as well as Americans, and who forever carry a special burden of each life they were unable to save.

The film features Sergeant Kristina Hilstad (Pennington), First Sergeant Robert Brady, and Staff Sergeant Philip Belmont and their families.