The 2016 recipient of the US Fiction Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Blood Stripe is the story of a female war veteran’s return to civilian life. The directorial debut of Remy Aubernonois, the film was cowritten by Auberjonois and Kate Nowlin, who co-star in the work.
An excerpt from Blood Stripe plays at the Walker on Thursday, September 15 as part of Cinema of Urgency: Local Voices, a showcase of contemporary works by Minnesota filmmakers who connect national debates to specific districts, funding, and infrastructure. In advance of the program, I connected with Auberjonois to discuss the film. This is the foftj interview with each of the filmmakers showcased in Thursday’s program: E.G. Bailey, D.A. Bullock, Mahmoud Ibrahim and Nathan Fisher, Karl Jacob, Dawn Mikkelson, Keri Pickett, and Norah Shapiro.
While other films—from The Best Years of our Lives (Wyler, 1946) to The Hurt Locker (Bigelow, 2009)—depict servicemen returning to civilian life, it is unusual to see comparable stories about the experiences of female veterans. What made you decide to focus on a woman’s return home? Do you think that gender influences the experiences of people returning from deployment, be it by shaping access to resources or the official support available?
We decided to make a film about a female returning from war because it’s a new character that we haven’t seen. The story of returning from war is one of the oldest stories we tell, but the American woman veteran who has seen combat is a new character type and we felt there was a space in the genre. There are a lot of documentary films being made now on the subject, and there is a lot of reportage, but we haven’t seen many of these stories told in a narrative fictional context. We felt like it was a way to introduce the issues inherent to the subject to an audience that might not consume documentaries, and provide an entrée for the audience into the experience through empathy and engagement with character and story.
As to the role of gender in the experience of homecoming, it is our understanding that a lot of women returning from deployment experience it differently from men because they are not expected to have “been in the shit” by the civilian population. So I think there is an assumption sometimes that they won’t have been affected in the same ways as their male counterparts. Of course this is a fallacy in many cases, particularly because these wars against guerrilla insurgents have no “front lines.” Gender also comes into play because many of these women are wives and mothers and have to return to these “traditional roles.” This I think presents its own set of challenges. Also, when we are speaking of women who have served, we cannot avoid the fact of military sexual trauma (MST), which admittedly plagues both men and women.
Blood Stripe depicts the protagonist Our Sergeant’s struggles with PTSD without using flashbacks or identifying a singular source of trauma. What made you decide to focus on the experiences after her return instead of during her deployment?
We wanted there to be some mystery. We wanted to challenge the audience, and trust them. We wanted the audience to project the what and the how. I felt that the audience would bring their own associations from other sources to the story. Hollywood can make big war movies, but as a scrappy independent film we were constrained by our resources, which I think opened up a whole area of exploration. We drop clues, but we found when we were writing that when we had the character speak about what “happened” to her it minimized the potential scope. She is plagued by “war” and everything that represents. Kate pointed out early on that in Greek tragedy the blood is almost always shed off-stage. There is a lot of violence depicted in todays films. There is violence implicit in our film, but not depicted. I hope that creates more tension and potentially allows for a greater emotional catharsis. Also, speaking about trauma is the beginning of healing, and so many people who struggle with this type of trauma are not healing. There are no easy answers to this epidemic; we wanted the audience to engage with the problem, without our prescribing a solution.
The film specifically addresses the difficulties in receiving support from the VA. Did you hope this film would raise awareness about the challenges faced by veterans?
We wanted to make a film about a pressing, contemporary, dare I say “urgent,” issue, without being preachy or having it feel like watching it is taking medicine. Our ambition was to make a cinematic, artful, dramatic film that is truly about something. Many things. When we were financing the film the tragic reality of veterans dying while on waitlists at the VA was unfolding. It was certainly a somber validation of the relevancy of our subject matter. We hoped to use the tools of independent drama to enlighten and expose a reality. Our goals are to entertain, expose, and contribute to an understanding of a very current human condition. It is only one version of the veteran experience, and trauma is universal.
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