IndieFlix In The Media

Doris Kent knows if she took a political stand in the debate over the war in Iraq , people might tune out her true message:

Know my son. Know what was lost.

"I'm not going to tell people how to think," she said. "I'm going to ask them the questions to make them think - to ask the question, 'What kind of America do we want to be?' "

Kent 's eldest son, U.S. Army Cpl. Jonathan Santos, was killed in Iraq by a suicide bomber Oct. 15, 2004, a little more than three weeks after his 22nd birthday. The Sehome High School graduate lost his life in a war Kent fears is slipping from the consciousness of the majority of Americans who have the luxury of knowing no one on the battlefield.

News coverage of war fatalities doesn't often help people understand, either, she said.

"It breaks my heart that their names aren't important enough to say anymore," Kent said. She knows there is a heartbroken family for every soldier who has been killed or wounded.

"I want people not only to remember Jonathan," Kent said. "We as Americans have a democratic process. We as a nation went to war. We as a nation need to pay attention."

Kent hopes a short film showing Sunday in Bellingham will encourage people to pay closer attention.

"The Corporal's Boots," by Seattle filmmaker Patricia Boiko, is about a traveling exhibit called "Eyes Wide Open" that displays one pair of boots for each soldier killed in Iraq . The film includes an interview with Kent talking about her son, an Arabic linguist with the 9th Psychological Operations Battalion from Fort Bragg, N.C. He had hoped the Army would help pay for college.

Kent hopes the short, emotionally powerful film will resonate with everyone, no matter how they feel about the war itself.

"I just need both (sides) to see it," Kent said, her voice deepening with emotion. "I think when they see it, it will speak to both their hearts."

The "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit, sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, stopped in Seattle last April. Boiko shows the display through the eyes of Jeannie Graves, the mother of a former soldier, who strolled through the rows of boots at the Seattle Center , set up like the ghosts of soldiers in formation.

When Graves stepped outside for some air, she watched a woman and two teenage boys stop at one of the pair of boots, kneel down and delicately tie a bracelet and a cross into their laces.

Graves later told Boiko about seeing the woman, who turned out to be Kent and her sons Justin and Jared.

"Her story was so touching that people around me were just sobbing," Boiko remembered. "I took my camera the next day and went to the exhibit and found the exact boots she was talking about."

Boiko later tracked down Kent and asked if she would like the footage of the boots. She then traveled to Bellingham to interview Santos ' family.

As the two women talked, Kent revealed that Santos bought a camera before leaving for Iraq , and took hours of footage before he died. He also kept a journal of his deployments to Haiti and Iraq . Kent offered them both to Boiko.

So Boiko is working on a second project, one that will incorporate Santos ' words and images into a short film of 15 minutes or so.

Boiko has gotten to know Santos watching his footage in her editing studio.

She accompanied Santos to family weddings.

She watched him gaze at a friend's newborn baby.

She saw his view of the Iraqi desert.

She lingered for the several minutes Santos left the camera on while he made a "grim reaper" character out of black electrician's tape to hang in his truck in Iraq .

At first, Boiko said, she couldn't work with Santos ' tapes for more than an hour or two at a time.

"I would cry and cry," she said. "He's a very bright young man with a great sense of humor. He's so much like friends of my son. He's a real boy."

Boiko also glimpsed the man Santos was becoming in the films he made and the words he left.

"He was very much like me. He took footage of everything," she said. "He really would have been a filmmaker and maybe a writer."

A part-time family physician and documentarian working on a feature-length film about her own family, Boiko wasn't planning on taking on a project about Santos . But Kent's mission became her own - and not just because Santos was about the same age as Boiko's own children.

"I show rough cuts to people, and really, they have forgotten we have a war going on there," said Boiko. "It does amaze me how people have been able to put it out of their minds."

"When people actually can see somebody and personalize it and get to know one person," Boiko said, "they will care and they will remember."