Forty percent of the soldiers who served in Iraq during the filming of OFF TO WAR were reservists and members of the National Guard, with nearly 3,000 of those soldiers coming from the 39th Brigade, based in Arkansas. We grew up in Arkansas, so OFF TO WAR is a personal story for us. We have friends fighting in Iraq with whom we went to grade school and hung out in high school. Since we began making this film, 33 soldiers from the 39th Brigade have lost their lives.

The National Guardsmen are part-time citizen soldiers, or at least used to be. Most never expected to be deployed to a combat zone. They didn't sign up for that. But times have changed, of course, since 9/11, and now these Guardsmen must adjust to life as full-time combat soldiers. Their families have no choice but to soldier on without them, waiting, praying that the horrible things they see on the nightly news don't claim the lives of their loved ones.

OFF TO WAR will undoubtedly cause people to question their assumptions about war, whatever those assumptions may be, but this film is not political, or at least has no political agenda. When we started out, we were expecting to make a film about a group of soldiers deployed for a postwar peace and stability mission, but it quickly turned into something very different. President Bush had already declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, but in April 2004, we rolled into Baghdad and straight to the bloodiest month of the war thus far. As one soldier says in the film, "We trained for the best, we got the worst."

We spent an entire year in Iraq, the length of their deployment, with the soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard. Simultaneously, we kept up with their families back home, running businesses and raising children alone, sitting through the nearly daily tragic news from Iraq and dealing with their own fluctuating feelings about the war. From full-scale combat to the heartbreaking return of a critically injured soldier to his family back home, OFF TO WAR tells the story of a war no one expectedto be fighting, through the eyes of the soldiers and families who endured it.




BIOGRAPHY
Brent and Craig Renaud are brothers and filmmakers who were born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. Since 1995, they have been working with celebrated documentary filmmaker Jon Alpert at the Downtown Community TV Center in New York on award-winning projects in places like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Bolivia, China, Pakistan and Iraq. Their programs have aired on HBO, PBS, CBS, the Discovery Channel, the Discovery Times Channel and ESPN.

The Renauds were embedded with the Arkansas National Guard for two years (including one year in Iraq) while filming OFF TO WAR. The work on the series garnered them a nomination for the Directors Guild of America Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary Award in 2005. Off to War has also won an Overseas Press Club Award - the Carl Spielvogel Award. Off to War has also just been nominated for the 2006 IDA awards for Best Limited Series. Additionally, the Renaud brothers' first film for HBO's America Undercover series, DOPE SICK LOVE, in which they followed the lives of two drug addicted couples on the streets of New York City for 18 months, was recently nominated for a 2005 National News and Docs Emmy (Best Documentary).

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
ESPN: The Season 2001 (Producer, Camera, Editor)
Afghanistan: From Ground Zero to Ground Zero, 2002 (Producer/Camera/Editor)
China -To Have and To Have Not, 2002 (Producer/Camera/Editor)
Coca and the Congressman, 2003 (Producer/Camera/Editor)
Bridge to Baghdad, 2003 (Producer/Camera/Editor)
Dope Sick Love, 2004 (Producer/Director/Camera/Editor)
Off to War, 2004-2005 (Producer/Director/Camera/Editor)

CURRENTLY IN PRODUCTION
Taking the Hill (2006)
Central High (2006)
Little Rock Central High: 50 Years Later (2006)