SYNOPSIS
The film follows Al Moon, a Yurok Vietnam War veteran from Northern California, on a journey across America to confront his past and the nation's ecological trauma. Amid environmental ruin, structural violence, and the erosion of Indigenous traditions, he attempts to reunite with fellow veterans, retracing fragments of loss. The people he meets mirror a divided America wrestling with its own wounds, reflecting Al’s inner turmoil. The film’s quiet aesthetic offers a poetic meditation on survival, belonging, and the search for connection.
REVIEW
New Beginnings is a road-movie documentary that follows Al Moon, a Vietnam War veteran living on a Native American reservation in Northern California. Leaving behind his tribal land—now ravaged by ecological devastation—he travels across the United States to reconnect with his fellow soldiers.
The challenges Al Moon faces are layered and deeply intertwined. His community has endured generations of discrimination and marginalization, now compounded by environmental catastrophe. The illnesses afflicting his people echo the traumas he carries from Vietnam. For Al Moon, confronting these ghosts is the first step toward mending the wounds of the present. Yet New Beginnings frames this journey not as his alone, but as a shared odyssey for all those navigating a fractured society. Those he meets along the road are wanderers too, bearing their own scars, adrift in body or in spirit.
As fragments of Al Moon’s personal history surface, the film also captures the uneasy atmosphere of the Trump era. While the ghosts of the past haunt the present, the present also resurrects the ghosts of the past. And yet, the journey is not without hope. Amid the film’s prevailing silence and shadow, a glimmer of light remains—a light Al Moon follows with quiet resolve. The result is a work that, through eloquent visual and sonic language, portrays a painful yet courageous quest for renewal.
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
We met a man marked by history, and with the fierce desire to free himself from its burden. From the start, it wasn’t about explaining — definitely not about speaking in Al's place — but about creating the space-time for him not to testify or confess, but to become through speaking, to find a voice through which he could reclaim his own story. That process is an act of creation — performative, transformative — in which Al turned a life shaped by oppression and loss into active memory, into a narrative of emancipation. We worked together, and in doing so, a mutual shift took place.
