Welcome Home, Sister

To get tickets to this screening, please go to: https://www.welcomehomesister.com/

The Pinion Pines trailer park sits in a high valley, the peaks of Colorado’s sheer mountains keeping the town in a kind of isolation. Penni Evans lives there, alone, and with the memories of war the guiding ethic of her mobile home's décor.

Evans served as a civilian volunteer in America’s war in Vietnam, supporting the troops, wounded and under fire, as a Donut Dollie with the American Red Cross. In that role, she experienced much of what any military veteran of the war would – firefights and nightmares, fear and pain, risk and the long legacy of the chemicals used to thin out the country’s thick, perilous jungle landscape. But she never qualified as a veteran of the war, and has been denied repeatedly the health benefits that those in the ranks have received. She feels deeply an absence – of a government’s recognition, both material and symbolic.

Now, at 77, she is fighting again, this time a cancer that has already claimed both of her breasts and, her doctors say, potentially resulted from her exposure to the Agent Orange herbicide that the U.S. government used so promiscuously during the war.

Her story – born of a family’s legacy of wartime patriotism – raises the question of what we owe those who fight the nation’s wars regardless of bureaucratic status.

And, at a time when questions again are being raised about women’s role in the American military, Penni’s story proves that sacrifice and valor is not confined to a single sex and endures long after the shooting ends. “Welcome Home, Sister,” the film’s title, is the informal greeting used among those she served with but has never been formally offered by her country.