Washington, D.C. Film Festival


The Ground Truth


Director: Patricia Foulkrod
Patricia FoulkrodPatricia Foulkrod began her career in film and television as an assistant in news and public affairs at WNET/13 in New York. She honed her producing skills on industrial films for such companies as Boeing Airplane Company, Mercedes Benz, Air France and Disney.

After moving to Los Angeles in the early 1980s, she produced the acclaimed 70 mm documentary THE LIVING SEAS, produced and directed THEY'RE DOING MY TIME, an hour-long PBS documentary focusing on children whose mothers are in prison, and later executive-produced a CBS Movie of the Week version of THEY'RE DOING TIME, which starred Angela Bassett. Foulkrod also co-produced the six-hour documentary series, THE NATIVE AMERICANS for Turner Broadcasting.

Foulkrod's credits include over 10 feature films including, The LINGUNI INCIDENT starring Rosanna Arquette and David Bowie and AMERICAN RHAPSODY starring Scarlet Johansson.

During California's contentious recall race in 2005, Foulkrod served as the Southern California Grassroots Director for Arianna Huffington's campaign for Governor. Additionally, she created Peace on the Beach, an event involving thousands of people forming a Picasso aerial image for peace. She has organized additional aerial images with John Quigley for Greenpeace, and for homeless war veterans, as part of the Discovery Channel's NOW.



Synopsis
THE GROUND TRUTH: After the Killing Ends, takes an unflinching look at the training and dehumanization of US soldiers, and how they struggle to come to terms with it when they come back home.

This film overrides familiar images of heroic soldiers in battle, and overjoyed returning faces, reunited with their families with one effortless stroke. Instead, we see a scenario that can include illness, amputation and injury, depression and post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), of which Iraq has become a fertile breeding ground. While America's poor treatment of veterans is not news to most, The Ground Truth makes it so personal and real, it is impossible to dismiss its characters simply as war statistics.

The film gives us glimpses into a Marine Corps boot camp that allows us to comprehend how a man or woman can kill as part of their job. We get hit with more understanding of our soldiers' dehumanization by seeing Iraq combat footage that shows routine indiscriminate killing. Their jobs over, the confusion, guilt and shame that comes home with these "killers" is the tip of the iceberg. Left with few resources and families that cannot understand what they have seen or done, their anguish only intensifies. Foulkrod's graphic footage and still-photographs of the ground conflict in Iraq, should forever shatter the sanitized images found on the nightly news and provide a much needed wake-up call for all of us.
Cast and crew. »