Soul Patrol Trailer: Sundance Winner Arrives This November

Winner of the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, J.M. Harper’s Soul Patrol tells the story of the Vietnam War’s first Black special operations team as they reunite to dig up the past. Ahead of a November 6 release from Kino Lorber, the first trailer has now arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “SOUL PATROL uncovers a hidden chapter of American military history by focusing on the Vietnam War’s first Black special ops team, an elite unit operating deep behind enemy lines. With unprecedented access to this once-secretive group of African-American veterans, director J.M. Harper reconstructs their journey with an immediacy rarely seen in Vietnam War storytelling, using raw Super 8 footage, photographs, and audio recordings from their personal archives. Opening on the war’s 50th anniversary, the surviving members reunite in a hotel that becomes a surreal liminal space, where memory, brotherhood, and unresolved trauma collide. As the men reflect on their experiences, the film interrogates the contradictions of fighting for freedom abroad while facing inequality at home.”

Dan Mecca said in his review, “J.M. Harper’s Soul Patrol is a compelling account of the Vietnam War’s first Black special operations team, told 50 years later. An onslaught of mixed mediums, it is fascinatingly incomplete in certain moments, fully realized in others. The survivors reunite and reminisce, brought together by fellow member and author Ed Emanuel, who wrote the 2003 book Soul Patrol: The Riveting True Story of the First African American LRRP Team in Vietnam. “We survived the war, but there was no peace,” Emanuel says at one point. In another scene, one veteran reflects on the soldiers taking leave in Thailand at a hotel with a pool. He recalls swimming in the water and “trying to wash Vietnam off of my body.”

See the trailer below.