At the 2024 G.I. Film Festival in May, short film “We Carry On” won Best Documentary Short Film and Women’s Voice Award. Presented by the Wounded Warrior Project and Community Building Art Works, “We Carry on” follows twelve caregivers of severely wounded veterans through a six-week virtual poetry workshop as they prepare to take the stage, perform their collaborative poem, and reflect on shared experiences. The short film is now available to watch on YouTube.
Seema Reza, Community Building Art Works CEO and co-founder, said CBAW got its start as a nonprofit in the military healthcare system at Walter Reed and Fort Belvoir Community hospitals. She started at Walter Reed Medical Center in 2010.
“I am a poet and a visual artist,” she said. “What I learned in my time there was that community was the most essential piece in recovering from both emotional and physical injury. We use writing and visuals to help people figure out what it is that they contain and communicate it to the people around them. One of the things we know about post-traumatic stress disorder is that there are four primary emotions associated with PTSD. They are anger, grief, fear, and shame. Anger, grief, and shame have physical ways they leave our body, but shame requires a community.”
Reza said shame requires showing ourselves to the community and receiving from the community in “the wholeness of who you are.”
“There is so much repair that happens when we get to be vulnerable and expose what we think are our deepest, darkest secrets. The things we are ashamed to feel. The things we are afraid to show. And then to be received by the community who says they can see that in themselves, and identifying with their experiences, and we are still here for you,” she said. “That is what all our programs aim to do.”
Reza said for this project, she worked with a group of military caregivers if service members of what Wounded Warriors would call catastrophically wounded and need a lot of care.
“We gathered a group of their caregivers. They happened to be all women. Mostly spouses. But a few moms of these people who have been severely wounded in combat. We gathered virtually at first to talk about the connections to their stories through a poetry workshop. Then we took a lot of their writing and put it into a script. Wounded Warriors brought these women out to the D.C. area. We had one opportunity to rehearse the script, this collaborative poem they wrote together, and then they performed it for an audience of the public at a local theatre. It was an extraordinary thing.”
Reza said in this process, they do not only assign participants their own lines, but have them recite other people in the group’s lines so the burden of it is not on the person who said it.
“So, they were able to hear their experiences in other people’s voices,” she said. “It was a beautiful thing to see how they showed up for one another, and each of them said made it enormous impact on how they isolated they felt in the performance.”
Reza said they made the film of the entire process, and it is a beautiful documentary made by the filmmakers.
“They did a wonderful job at keeping the performance, but also keeping these people as individuals who have their own stories. People who live in this shadow of caregiving but did a beautiful job in showing their whole unique strengths,” she said.
“We Carry On” is now available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=22rQIa4Mkow.
