Missing in America

Jake is a veteran who has lived alone in the forests of the Pacific Northwest since coming back from Vietnam. He sees nobody. One day his old platoon mate Henry turns up, with his small half-Vietnamese daughter Lenny. Henry has lung cancer and wants to leave his daughter with Jake. Jake refuses. The next morning Henry has vanished and the child is still there. The film was written, produced and directed by Gabrielle Savage Dockterman; it is her first feature. The story rests on what Ken Miller went through in Vietnam as a Green Beret and a helicopter pilot. Danny Glover plays Jake and Zoe Weizenbaum the child; Ron Perlman, Linda Hamilton and David Strathairn are in the cast. The telling does not do the war in flashbacks; the man's life in the forest is already the continuation of it. The change comes not with a large event but with the child staying.