Two generations. Two wars. One story.
Souvenirs is the first cross-genre family/war movie that uses war stories to explore the themes of war, storytelling and family. It’s about the intensity of war, the challenges of true leadership, and the importance of passing down wisdom through the generations.
When a just-returned-home Army soldier, Kyle Vogel, leaves a handwritten letter on the passenger seat of his car, walks into a Minnesota forest alone and removes a pistol from his pocket, we wonder who he is, how he got here and what he’s about to do. The rest of the film answers these three questions in a magical way that crosses two continents and multiple time periods.
We start by seeing how Kyle was wounded in Iraq. When he’s sent to a trauma center, a female lieutenant (Kelly Tripp) catches wind of his penchant for taking the souvenirs of battle. When Tripp asks Kyle why he collects so many objects, he launches into a story about the single most formative day of his youth. On Memorial Day in 1993, when Kyle was just 13, he discovered a beat-up footlocker in a storm cellar at his grandparents’ Minnesota farmhouse. When presented with the footlocker, Bud Vogel —a veteran of the 82nd Airborne during World War II—refused to talk about the objects inside. Kyle used his persuasive abilities to change his grandfather’s mind, however, cajoling Bud into letting him pick three objects for the telling.
What follows in “Souvenirs” are not only Bud’s tales of battle, but intimate stories of friendship, loss, triumph, regret and acceptance. Over the course of one afternoon on a quiet farmhouse porch—and despite Bud’s failing short-term memory—we not only flash back to Bud’s incredible experiences in World War II, but also flash forward to see how Kyle’s experiences as a Minnesota National Guard “Red Bull” have mirrored those experiences.
After Kyle finishes telling Tripp about the footlocker, he returns for one final mission before his unit is due to be sent home. That mission forces Kyle to make his toughest call as a squad leader. Presented with a moral dilemma of leadership similar to one faced by Bud—whether to spare an individual life or let one person die to potentially save many others—Kyle comes to a full understanding of why his grandfather was so reluctant to share his war stories.
