Patton Veterans Project will premiere several short films created by area veterans tonight on the Aims Community College campus in Greeley.
The free event starts at 6 p.m. and will be held in Miller Auditorium in the Welcome Center, 4901 W. 20th St.
The veterans created the films at the Patton Veterans Project workshop at Aims in January.
“The Patton Veterans Project is here in the Northern Colorado region with the I Was There film workshops to offer an opportunity to veterans to learn the art of filmmaking from professionals in the film community,” Mike Leeman wrote in a statement.
Leeman is an Aims and University of Northern Colorado graduate who worked on the project and works for the VA.
Benjamin Patton, grandson of World War II legend Gen. George S. Patton III and son of Vietnam-era Gen. George S. Patton, founded the Patton Veterans Project in 2011.
Per its website, Benjamin Patton founded the nonprofit after several summers leading film camps where teenage boys and girls produced short films largely centering on adolescent identity. Those films led him to wonder whether this same process of collaborating to create visual narratives this way could also benefit veterans returning from combat deployment as they sought to transition home and find their “new norm.”
This inspiration led to the inception of the I Was There Film Workshops initiative. In the spring of 2011, Patton and a team of professional filmmakers were invited to host their veterans film workshop at the Warrior Transition Unit at Fort Carson, located south of Colorado Springs, where hundreds of soldiers were undergoing mental health treatment.
Since its founding, the nonprofit has hosted more than 50 film workshops at several military bases, VA hospitals, universities and private clinics both in the U.S. and Israel, enabling more than 1,000 veterans from ages 18 to 80 to collaborate on more than 300 short films expressing their experiences. Along the way, the Patton Veterans Project began conducting pre- and post-workshop surveys of participants, indicating the workshop resulted in a significant drop in post-traumatic stress symptoms, especially among those who report a PTSD diagnosis.
“The video camera is the most powerful and widely used communications tool ever invented. What better way for vets and community members to better understand one another? Film is a language we all speak,” Patton said in a release.
Go to the nonprofit’s website, pattonveteransproject.org, to learn more.
