The Re-Membered Father asks a radical question:
What if one new truth could transform every old memory?
Through 30,000 hand-painted frames and the voice of Karen Jones, a daughter reckoning with her father’s war trauma, this short film invites viewers into a dreamlike experience — where memory dissolves, drips, and reassembles before our eyes. It’s not just a film to be watched. It’s a film to be entered.
What distinguishes this story is not only its form — but its revelation: Karen was 17 when she longed for her father’s love. Jesse was 20 when he landed on Normandy Beach. Two young people separated by decades, carrying parallel wounds.
This perspective — trauma as it imprints on the developing brain — transforms The Re-Membered Father into more than a veteran story. It becomes an exploration of stolen youth, intergenerational echoes, and the fragile threshold between childhood and adulthood.
What begins as a void between father and daughter transforms into a visual world of color, wonder, and unexpected connection. What if memory gave you a second chance to change the way your story ends?
That’s the arc. And it’s told not through exposition — but through brushstroke, line and color, as memory is reframed and reimagined in real time.
It’s testimony turned into emotional landscape.
It’s trauma — re-authored.
It’s memory — in motion.
WHY THIS FILM
More than 300 million families worldwide live in the wake of war.
But few stories capture what happens when war collides with youth— thrust into brutality, their brains still forming, their identities unfinished.
Jesse’s trauma at 20 on Normandy Beach — mirrored by his daughter Karen’s longing at 16 for his love — opens a new dimension to the PTSD story. This is not just about veterans. It is about what happens when brutal memories are pressed into young minds, and how those memories echo across generations.
The Re-Membered Father makes that silence visible. And then, it reimagines it.
Where most films about PTSD emphasize darkness, The Re-Membered Father invites light. Its hand-painted style opens space for wonder, whimsy, and healing — for viewers who might otherwise turn away from the weight of trauma. It offers a powerful alternative to clinical language: a film that uplifts, animates, and expands what’s possible in memory storytelling.
For veterans. For families. For survivors of any kind.
This film says: What if memory gave you a second chance to change the way your story ends?
This is re-seeing. Re-membering. And ultimately, re-authoring — through art.