Achilles
Absolutions: War and Moral Injury is a feature-length documentary film in the final stages of post-production about veterans suffering from moral injury and the process of healing.
Moral injury is as great a contributor to the mental health crisis among veterans as PTSD, and the public needs to know about it.
The term ‘moral injury’ describes the distress caused by taking part in, witnessing, failing to prevent, being betrayed by or subjected to an act that violates one’s fundamental moral values and beliefs.
In war this can result from traumatic experiences such as harming civilians, failing to protect fellow soldiers, the realization that a war itself is unjust, ill-conceived or ineffectively prosecuted, or the experience of—in the case of Vietnam—not being well received upon return home from battle.
In the film, a Vietnam veteran tells of being assigned to retrieve a group of AWOL soldiers living with Vietnamese civilians. When he called for them to come out of a house, they came out shooting. He and his men were forced to shoot back and kill them. It took him fifty years to begin dealing with the trauma and he can’t talk about the incident without breaking down.
An Afghanistan war veteran served as a drone sensor operator, responsible for surveillance and the targeting and launching of Hellfire missiles. He resigned from that position when, after striking two insurgents, he watched a grieving teenage boy pick up and carry away what was left of his father’s body.
A Latina colonel base commander tells about walking amongst the bodies and body parts of her soldiers in Iraq after a mortar landed on their tent in the middle of the night. She feels guilty in part because she was the person responsible for signing off on the layout of the base and its defenses.
An Iraq war veteran is plagued by shooting a child.
Twenty-one veterans share testimonies of their military experiences leading to moral injury, its effects and the difficult process of healing. Therapists, chaplains and moral injury researchers from the VA provide context.
Absolutions explores survivors’ guilt, military sexual trauma, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and abandonment of Afghan comrades, and other related themes.
Moral injury causes profound disruptions in psychological, behavioral, social, and spiritual functioning as well as a loss of identity, a sense of right and wrong, and a loss of trust in others. The morally injured can feel profoundly cut off from loved ones, themselves, society and humanity at large.
PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—or simply, PTS) has over the last few decades become recognized and well understood by the medical community, the Veterans Administration, veterans and the general public. PTS is a neurological condition affecting the regions of the brain responsible for fear responses and resulting in flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance and severe anxiety, as well as intrusive thoughts about the triggering event. Untreated, PTS can last a lifetime and wreak havoc on veterans and their families.
But many veterans diagnosed with PTS may actually be suffering from moral injury, or a combination of the two. Each of these conditions requires a different approach to treatment, and treatments intended to help with PTS can actually worsen the effects of moral injury, or turn a veteran off from seeking help altogether. Both can lead to substance abuse and suicide. Last year, acccording to the VA, at least 17 veterans killed themselves every single day. But including early deaths from diseases of despair and self-destructive behavior, that number is certainly much larger.
Absolutions features interactions between veterans and caregivers—one-on-one and in groups—as they work to lessen the burden of their condition. A neuroscientist explains the latest research on how PTSD and moral injury affect the brain.
But this is not a conventional ‘educational’ film. Its approach and style reflect the deep, personal, interior nature of moral injury through gripping testimony, intimate conversations, rituals and other paths to healing. Interwoven with these, stylized images of combat and Veterans Day parades offer the viewer a visual tapestry that encourages reflection.
Quotes from Ancient Greek literature and mythology, religious texts and historical figures offer another level of insight into the film’s timeless themes. Spare and delicate original music provides a subtle underscore without signaling to viewers how to feel. Absolutions is intended to be a unique work of cinematic art that will attract attention, create buzz, stir discussion and debate, premiere in prestigious film festivals, be released on a major streaming service, and reach a wide public audience.
The three central themes of Absolutions are:
What war is actually like and how it causes moral injuries
What moral injury feels like and what it does to veterans
How healing can happen — through a variety of approaches
Absolutions will bring broad awareness to an urgent but under-recognized issue and spur the medical and therapeutic communities, thought leaders and policy makers to a new level of engagement in the need for healing wounded warriors. Suffering veterans and their families will realize that they are not alone, and they will learn about paths to recovery. The lessons learned in the film are equally applicable to first responders, healthcare workers and police officers, all of whom are vulnerable. Absolutions is intended to save lives.
photo: Richard Trammell
Scott Sinkler is an Emmy award-winning producer/director and director of photography with more than thirty years of experience.
His most recent effort is as co-producer and director of photography of Anxiety Club, about comedians with anxiety disorders, which premiered last fall at the prestigious DOC NYC film festival, and has since been invited to more than 40 film festivals worldwide. It can be seen now on the streaming service Jolt, and will be more widely available in the near future.
Sinkler served as director of photography for Netflix’ 5-part series Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror and Katie Couric’s Fed Up, as well as PBS’s Ice Warriors and series such as Wide Angle, The Tony Awards, Egg: The Arts Show, WNET’s City Arts & City Life, and Bloomberg Television’s series Muse, Game Changers, Risk Takers and Innovators. He spent six weeks in Vietnam, and contributed to the film The People Vs. Agent Orange.
In the 1980s Sinkler produced and directed the documentary Inside Life Outside, which chronicled the lives of a group of homeless people living in a shantytown on New York’s Lower East Side over a two and a half year period. That film was selected for the 1989 Whitney Biennial and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Sinkler’s films have won many awards at international film festivals, have aired on US and foreign TV networks and have been rented and purchased by hundreds of universities, libraries and organizations.
He has produced and directed arts programs, corporate media, as well as commercials and promotional materials for Broadway shows, including Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Movin’ Out, Thou Shalt Not, Gypsy, and the Tony Award-winning Contact.
He has written for books and magazines on documentary filmmaking and has given master classes in documentary cinematography at New York University.