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SXSW Talks: Heather Courtney, ‘Where Soldiers Come From’
When Austin filmmaker Heather Courtney decided to visit her home state of Michigan in February 2007 in hopes of shooting early footage for a documentary film she could have had no idea that her nascent project would take her to Afghanistan.
The University of Texas graduate wanted to make a movie about small town America. While back home capturing the wintry Michigan landscape, Courtney saw a story in a local newspaper about the Michigan National Guard.
After visiting the training facility, Courtney found the subjects for her documentary - a group of more than a half dozen teenage friends who had entered the Michigan National Guard for the financial reward and as a way to change their lives.
“The first six months I definitely did not know if it was going to be a story … but their characters started forming and I knew it could also be a portrait of this place and the people there if it didn’t turn out to be them going to war,” Courtney said this week over lunch. “That’s what I was most interested in anyways, was telling a story about this town and the people there.”
Courtney’s project would end up taking almost four years of her life, as she followed the young men from their training process, to the war zones of Afghanistan and back home to Michigan, where they and their families tried to return to a normal life after the tour.
The result of her years of work is the moving documentary, “Where Soldiers Come From,” which made its world premiere at SXSW Monday.
Though the movie follows three young men and their experiences as soldiers, Courtney says the movie, which never preaches a political message of any sort, is definitely not a war movie.
“It’s really about much more than [war] … It’s a movie about friends and family. And it’s also about the war at home - how the town has changed, how the families have changed by this very far away war and also how the war continues when they go home and have to sort of rebuild their civilian lives and how difficult that is,” Courtney said. “It doesn’t end just because they’re back home.”
In making the movie, the filmmaker and her co-editor, former Austinite Kyle Henry, combed through over 620 hours of footage. Their efforts resulted in the film winning the award for best documentary editing at SXSW.
Locals and SXSW attendees have one more chance this week to see “Where Soldiers Come From,” as the film screens at the Paramount Theatre on Saturday at 2:30 p.m.
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