Through the combat camera of Cpl. JV Villarreal – a young Texas Marine killed in Afghanistan – American Sons follows the decade-long journey of the brothers and family he left behind, building an intimate portrait of the wound war leaves – and the brotherhood that helps bear it.
#VeteranReconnection
The American Sons National Impact Tour is a 15-city veteran reconnection initiative built around the award-winning PBS documentary. Each stop is a free, 3-hour experience combining film screening, facilitated dialogue, and community connection – creating safe spaces where veterans, Gold Star families, and communities come together to heal. Because no one should carry this alone.
“It’s as if JV is telling his own story from beyond the grave.”
-Business Doc Europe
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Producers Statement
There is a silence that follows a warrior home.
It lives in conversations that never happen. In grief that Gold Star families carry alone. In the veteran still haunted by surviving.
That silence is the crisis.
Cpl. JV Villarreal pointed his camera at his own war and never made it home.
What he left behind became American Sons – a film that crosses the distance between what veterans carry and what the people who love them know how to receive.
Every room we screen it in proves the same thing.
Silence can be broken.
Supported by:
American Sons is a co-production of Infinite Warrior LLC, Latino Public Broadcasting, and Black Public Media with major funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. www.calhum.org.
Supported by the Jacquie Jones Memorial Fund. Additional funding is provided by Bexar County and the City of San Antonio Arts and Culture.
