Press & Reviews
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
“To say that Javorn Drummond, Jon Powers, Michael Goss and Stuart Wilf come from different walks of life is something of an understatement. If they hadn’t served together in Iraq in 2003-04, they never would’ve met. Now they’re back home, separated by geography, uneasy peace and haunting memories of what they saw and did during a war they determined to be pointless. They might meet again someday — or not — but they share a bond of life, death and military service that they’ll take to their graves.”
Don Clinchy, slackerwood.com
“… (the film) presents its subjects’ lives with great, grimy intimacy, demanding that we pay attention to their stories and reminding us that Uncle Sam has done them few favors since they left the military. It also has a refreshingly fearless sense of irony, making point after cynical point by juxtaposing patriotic clichés with harsh doses of truth. … beyond its activist raison d’être, it’s fine documentary filmmaking.”
Brent Simon, shockya.com
“An at times agonizing but very necessarily full-bodied portrait of the true cost of war, How to Fold a Flag shines a light on the human side of armed conflict. One of the finer documentaries of the year so far, it’s well worth checking out – both for those with a familial connection to the wars abroad, and for those without.”
Sam Adams, Time Out Chicago
” The country has moved on, but Tucker and Epperlein thankfully have not.”
Bernard Reed, Arkansas Times
“It is a sincere reminder of the fact that the tragedy of war is not contained in the Middle East, or Vietnam or Korea or the Western Front. It is a lingering melodrama that society—much less its soldiers—can never leave behind.”
Amy Boyd, Facets Features
“This is not a story about war, but a story about how America deals with its soldiers returning home from war.”
Chuck Tryon, The Chutry Experiment
“Now, seven years after Gunner Palace helped to shape the genre of the Iraq War documentary, Tucker and Epperlein offer a complex portait of what it means to come home.”
Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel
“This is a movie that will make you want to hug a vet. A lot of them need it.”
Ron Sutton, IDA
“For me, though, the heart of the festival resided in two films: Restrepo and How To Fold a Flag. Both films deal with military service, and together they made quite an impression on the audience, as well as the judges…”
Bronwen Dickey, Independent Weekly
“It’s a much more intricate, powerful portrait of the American soldier than one gets from pandering politicians or from Hollywood, which too often flattens Iraq vets into forever-damaged, two-dimensional basket cases.”
Chris Vognar, The Dallas Morning News
“Flag achieves the difficult task of making us care for its characters without simplifying them one iota”
Pamela Cohn, Hammer To Nail
“Tucker and Epperlein, a husband and wife team, have devoted their independent film work to documenting the US invasion of Iraq since its inception six years ago, starting with the excellent Gunner Palace, and have created one of the few deeply emotional and personal cinematic archives of this war”
Charles London, The Huffington Post
“As How to Fold a Flag powerfully shows, the costs of war do not only come overseas and do not end when the soldiers come home.”
Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters
“Looking for ways to feel relevant now that they’re back, the veterans in How to Fold a Flag are surely up against it. … As the film shows, in images both sharply etched and allusive, they embody difficulties—ideals and disappointments, memories and expectations—that most citizens, safe at home, have been encouraged to forget.”
Patricia Aufderheide, The Center for Social Media
“Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein have become chroniclers of the Iraq war-era America. (They bring some distance to the subject; she is German and he spent 12 years in Berlin.) Their documentaries — Gunner Palace, The Prisoner or: How I planned to Kill Tony Blair, Bulletproof Salesman, and now How to fold a Flag —carry us from 2003 to today.”
Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker Magazine
“… what starts off seeming like a traditional “vets returning home” documentary subtly morphs into a nuanced portrait of a country trying its best to emotionally distance itself from the reality of its foreign policy.”
