The Sundance directing winner hits theaters in time for Veterans Day. At Park City, Nas told me why he signed on.
In the summer of 1968, a 17-year-old Ed Emanuel boarded his first plane, bound for Vietnam. Somewhere in the air, the captain announced that Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Emanuel was flying toward a war on behalf of a country that had just lost another champion of the rights its Black citizens were still fighting to secure at home.
That moment sits at the center of "Soul Patrol," J.M. Harper's documentary about Company F, 51st Infantry, the Vietnam War's first all-Black Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol team. The men worked in six-man units deep behind enemy lines. Other soldiers called them the Soul Patrol. Fifty years later, almost nobody outside their families knew their names.
After winning the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and traveling the festival circuit for most of the year, the film opens in select theaters Nov. 6 through Kino Lorber, with special screenings on Veterans Day, Nov. 11.
The archive they kept because no one else would
The film is built on Emanuel's 2003 memoir, "Soul Patrol: The Riveting True Story of the First African American LRRP Team in Vietnam." Harper read it about six years ago and picked up the phone. Emanuel, who had spent years recording sit-down interviews with the men he served with, many of whom had died by the time Harper arrived, became the film's executive producer and its emotional engine.
What separates "Soul Patrol" from the Vietnam films most of us grew up on is where the images come from. The Super 8 footage, photographs and audio recordings are the soldiers' own. These young men documented themselves in the field, and that personal archive is the record history didn't bother to keep.
Hollywood's Vietnam put Black soldiers at the edges of the frame in "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket." It took until Spike Lee's "Da 5 Bloods" in 2020 for a major feature to put Black veterans at the center, and that was fiction. "Soul Patrol" is the testimony underneath it.
Harper frames the men's present-day reunion in a hotel that turns into a kind of in-between space, where memory and unresolved trauma refuse to stay in the past. He threads in Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches against the war, the era when Muhammad Ali was sentenced for refusing to serve, and reenactments with actors standing in for the ghosts Emanuel still carries, including his younger self. He also brings the men's partners into the room, a quiet acknowledgment that the women who lived beside these veterans carried the war home too.
Why it matters right now
Black men served and died in Vietnam in disproportionate numbers, yet they were largely invisible in the coverage that shaped how Americans remember the war. Journalist Jesse Lewis, who joined Harper and Emanuel at the film's Jan. 25 Sundance premiere, told Variety he was the only Black correspondent there and that writing about the Black GI earned him the resentment of white colleagues.
The erasure didn't end with the war. It continues every time a school district narrows what history it will teach. "Soul Patrol" arrives as both a thank-you that came 50 years late and a correction to the record. A dream deferred is not a dream denied, and these men waited half a century for someone to say what they did out loud.
Why Nas got involved
Nas is a producer on the film, alongside Harper, Sam Bisbee, Danielle Massie and Peter Bittenbender, his longtime partner at Mass Appeal, which is among the companies behind the project. When I caught up with Nas at Sundance, I asked him why a story about Black soldiers in 1968 was his fight.
"That's what I'm here to do," Nas said. "I feel like I'm an artist and to express my concerns about the world and history. I have a great opportunity being an artist to do that. So I'm a film guy, a music guy and here's an opportunity. And I'm grateful to be a part of it."
For three decades, Nas has used his music to keep Black history in the conversation. Putting his name on "Soul Patrol" carries that work from the record to the screen and puts a hip-hop legend's platform behind men who were teenagers when they went to war.
When and where to see 'Soul Patrol'
Nov. 5: Sneak preview with a Q&A with Harper, 7:30 p.m., IFC Center, New York.
Nov. 6: Opens in select theaters. IFC Center hosts a Q&A with Harper at the 7:15 p.m. show.
Nov. 11: Veterans Day special screenings, including AMC locations.
Nov. 13: Los Angeles opening.
Nov. 13-19: Tara Theatre, Atlanta.
Streaming: Rotten Tomatoes lists a Dec. 15 streaming date. No platform had been named as of Oct. 29.
"Soul Patrol" runs 100 minutes and is not rated.
These men came home in 1969 to a country that didn't want to hear it. They kept their own footage, their own photos and their own story for 50 years. This November, the least we can do is buy a ticket and listen.
Here’s our review of Soul Patrol
