KINO LORBER ACQUIRES DOC 'SOUL PATROL'

 

KINO LORBER ACQUIRES NORTH AMERICAN RIGHTS TO J.M. HARPER’S SUNDANCE PRIZE-WINNING 'DOC SOUL PATROL'

Based on the bestselling memoir by veteran Ed Emanuel, and winner of the US Documentary Competition Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival

In theaters this fall

“Jolting and heartbreaking. An essential historical chronicle…at the heart of the documentary is the conflict between the men’s pride in their skill, bravery, and devotion and their doubts over the purported reasons for the war.”

– Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter

“Haunting, revelatory…Soul Patrol contributes a little-known chapter to the nation’s understanding of Vietnam War and Black history.”

– Lisa Kennedy, Variety

“A compelling account of the Vietnam War’s first Black special operations team, told 50 years later…These are Black men who survived against all odds.”

– Dan Mecca, The Film Stage

Kino Lorber acquires J.M. Harper’s ‘Soul Patrol,’ a hidden chapter of Vietnam War history

Kino Lorber has acquired North American distribution rights to J.M. Harper’s “Soul Patrol,” an intimate, formally adventurous documentary that reunites the first all-Black special operations team 50 years after their service in the Vietnam War. Based on Ed Emanuel’s bestselling memoir, the film premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where Harper received the Directing Award, and has since traveled through a dense nonfiction circuit including True/False, Full Frame, DC/DOX, and a prize-winning stop at the Sarasota Film Festival. The distributor is planning an awards-season theatrical rollout this fall, with digital, educational, and home-video releases to follow.

In “Soul Patrol,” Harper turns his camera to Company F, 51st Infantry, an elite Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol unit operating deep behind enemy lines, and draws out a story that has largely lived in the footnotes of American military history. With unprecedented access to this once-secretive group of Black veterans, the director constructs an immersive collage from raw Super 8 footage, photographs, and audio recordings culled from their personal archives, layering those materials with present-day testimony. 

The film is structured around a reunion for the war’s 50th anniversary, staged in a hotel that becomes a kind of liminal bunker where memory, brotherhood, and long-sublimated trauma surface in real time. As the men revisit missions carried out in Vietnam, the documentary presses into the contradictions of fighting for “freedom” abroad while returning to a country still marked by segregation, surveillance, and unequal treatment at home.

Karoliina Dwyer, Kino Lorber’s vice president of acquisitions, negotiated the acquisition with CAA and Submarine representing the filmmakers. For Harper, whose practice traverses editing, archival work, and field-driven vérité, the project has been both an artistic experiment and a historical corrective. “Making ‘Soul Patrol’ has been one of the great honors of my life,” he said in a statement, noting that Emanuel and his fellow soldiers “have carried [this story] quietly for half a century,” and that the hope has always been to help “restore their place in history.” Harper called Kino Lorber “a meaningful partner” for a film that aims to preserve memory, challenge viewers, and expand the record of who is seen and centered in war storytelling.

Lisa Schwartz, Kino Lorber’s chief distribution & revenue officer, said the film “stayed with [her] long after its Sundance premiere,” adding that it felt “unbelievable that the story of this incredible group of veterans had not been told long ago.” Citing the film’s dense archival layering, precise visual language, and emotionally frank exchanges among the veterans, Schwartz framed “Soul Patrol” as “essential documentary storytelling” and an overdue acknowledgment of a unit whose recognition has lagged far behind its risk and sacrifice.

The pickup marks Kino Lorber’s second acquisition from this year’s Sundance lineup, after Rafael Manuel’s “Filipiñana,” and extends a busy 2026 for the independent distributor. Its documentary “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” recently won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, joining “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” a 2025 Oscar nominee, in a growing cluster of politically pointed nonfiction titles that began their awards campaigns in Park City. With “Soul Patrol,” “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” and “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” now under the same banner, the company continues to carve out a lane for films that investigate power, conflict, and the afterlives of policy through an auteur-driven lens.

Behind the camera, “Soul Patrol” gathers a network of producers and backers recognizable to anyone watching contemporary nonfiction. The film is a Wavelength and Impact Partners presentation of a Park Pictures and Gestalt Picture Co. production, made in association with Mass Appeal and the Concordia Fellowship. It is written and directed by Harper and based on Emanuel’s book, with producing credits for Sam Bisbee, Danielle Massie, Harper, Nasir Jones, and Peter Bittenbender, and an extensive roster of executive producers including Emanuel, Joe Plummer, Jenifer Westphal, Stacey Reiss, Lance Acord, Jackie Kelman Bisbee, Cody Ryder, Wendy Neu, Jenny Raskin, Kelsey Koenig, Lauren & John Driscoll, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Davis Guggenheim, Rahdi Taylor, Andrew Gertler, Max Allman, Ted Haddock, and Nina & David Fialkow.

For Harper, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and father of two, “Soul Patrol” is a second feature that consolidates a rapid ascent through the documentary ranks. His debut, “As We Speak,” bowed in Sundance’s U.S. Documentary Competition in 2024, and he has edited four features, including the Emmy-nominated series “JEEN-YUHS: A KANYE TRILOGY.” In 2024, he was named to DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40” list, and in 2025, he received both the Concordia Fellowship and Film Independent’s Amplifier Fellowship for “Soul Patrol,” which premiered at Sundance 2026 and earned him the directing prize in that same U.S. competition.

The companies behind “Soul Patrol” have become reliable engines for precisely this kind of work. With a library of more than 4,000 titles, Kino Lorber has been a mainstay of North American arthouse distribution for more than four decades, releasing about 30 films per year and collecting 16 Academy Award nominations since 2000, including its 2026 Oscar win for “Mr. Nobody Against Putin.” Its parent group now encompasses MHz Choice, a streamer specializing in international series, and Kino Film Collection, a subscription platform for new releases and restored catalog titles, while its educational and home-entertainment arm sends hundreds of films annually into classrooms and libraries.

Park Pictures — founded by Bisbee, Jackie Kelman Bisbee, and Acord — has become a familiar presence at Sundance and other major festivals, with titles like “Robot & Frank,” “Infinitely Polar Bear,” “The Sentence, Earth Mama, and The Perfect Neighbor” moving between the arthouse and awards spheres. Its latest nonfiction slate includes “As We Speak” and now “Soul Patrol,” which took home this year’s U.S. Documentary Directing Award in Park City. Wavelength, led by Jenifer Westphal and Joe Plummer, has meanwhile established itself as a multi-Emmy and Tony-winning studio backing “great f**king stories,” with credits that range from “Feels Good Man” and “Athlete A” to the Tony-winning musical “The Outsiders” and a portfolio of brand-forward storytelling for clients like Nike, Adidas, and Uber Eats.

Impact Partners, the Brooklyn-based film fund that helped finance “Soul Patrol,” has, over nearly two decades, become a central patron of socially engaged nonfiction, supporting more than 150 films, including Oscar winners and nominees such as “Icarus,” “Sugarcane,” “Of Fathers and Sons,” “How to Survive a Plague,” and “Hell and Back Again.” Its roster also includes Peabody winners “Aftershock,” “Immigration Nation,” and “Audrie & Daisy”; Sundance prizewinner “Dina”; and theatrical breakouts like “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” a throughline that situates “Soul Patrol” squarely in the current documentary vanguard.

For now, “Soul Patrol” is poised between festival heat and a broader public, its subjects moving from a once-cloistered hotel reunion to the multiplex and, eventually, to classrooms and community screenings. 

In doing so, the film asks whether finally telling this story — and naming this unit’s place in history — can offer any measure of reckoning or repair for the men who lived it, and for the country that sent them to war.