The Purple Mango Post

Photo courtesy of Betsy Nagler

Early last year, I went to a festival of short films produced and directed by Stanford alumni. I watched the 15-minute trailer of "Flat Daddy," a documentary about military families coping with a loved one's deployment. My friend and I held hands and wept like fools. So when Stanford Magazine called a few months later and asked if I would interview filmmakers Betsy Nagler and Nara Garber, I was stoked. The story is up now at Stanford Magazine.

The movie is about Flat Daddies (and Flat Mommies), an American phenomenon that has surfaced during the wars of the last decade. These life-sized cardboard cutouts of servicemen and women have been produced and shipped to families to help children, spouses and parents cope with their loved one's absence during deployment. The movie follows several families who are living with Flat Daddy while their real daddy is overseas - or, as the 4-year-old daughter of one serviceman put it, "saving the world."

The Flat Daddies are a charming motif (the girl who throws her Flat Daddy off the couch in frustration when he falls onto her picture book was one of my favorites) but the movie is really about the impact of military deployment on families. It drives home the point that service in a foreign combat zone is a sacrifice not just on the part of the military member, but for his or her entire family. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drawing on greater numbers of reserve troops than any previous conflicts, families enduring deployment often find themselves alone in their community, without the support of a base or other military families nearby. The filmmakers have entered the movie for consideration in Sundance and are seeking distribution (check out their website to learn more).

When her son and daughter-in-law were both deployed to Iraq, Donna Winter and her husband opened their Minnesota home to their two young grandsons and their Flat parents (though in Minnesota, appropriately, the cut-outs are known as Heroes on a Stick.)  "I hope when people see [the film] they realize how important it is to stand behind those military families who are left behind," said Winter, who appears in the film and whom I interviewed for the story. "It doesn't matter where you stand politically. You always have to support the kids who are left behind."