The 2019 documentary Sunken Roads: Three Generations After D-Day marks the feature film directorial debut of Charlotte Juergens.
The film follows Ms. Juergens as she travels on a pilgrimage with a group of World War II D-Day veterans seeking to retrace the route they embarked on during the war in an acknowledgment of the 70th anniversary of the invasion.
Don McCarthy was 20 years old on D-Day, when his infantry division landed on Omaha Beach. This realization that Don and the other veterans who survived D-Day will soon pass into memory and legend is what inspired Juergens to join Don and seven other D-Day vets on their journey to France.
Over the course of the excursion, the vets come to see Charlotte as a granddaughter, trusting her with their stories as they confront the trauma that still haunts them 70 years after the war.
FIlmmaker Charlotte Juergens and WWII veteran Don McCarthy of Sunken Roads.
“I shot Sunken Roads when I was twenty years old. When the Veterans were that age, they’d trained for the D-Day invasion in Cornwall, crossed the channel to Omaha Beach, and fought to liberate French towns from German occupation,” said director/co-producer Juergens, who also works as an archival researcher at NBC News Archives and served as such for the Academy Award-nominated short documentary Joe’s Violin.
“Although they were still haunted by memories of horrific carnage, these soldiers felt compelled to return to Normandy, to ‘make the circle,’ as one of them put it. I was honored to accompany them.”
Sunken Road is distributed by First Run Features.
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