Kino Lorber acquires ‘Soul Patrol,’ the Sundance documentary about America’s first all-Black special operations team in Vietnam — a story half a century in the making that already won the top documentary prize at Sarasota.
Ed Emanuel and the men who served alongside him in Vietnam have carried their story quietly for more than fifty years. Not because it wasn’t worth telling. Because nobody asked.
Soul Patrol asks.
Kino Lorber has acquired North American distribution rights to the Sundance documentary, directed by J.M. Harper, and is planning an awards season theatrical release this fall. The film — which uses Super 8 footage, archival material, and intimate talking-head interviews — reconstructs the experience of one of Vietnam’s first Black special operations units and then reunites those veterans to watch themselves reckon with what they survived, what they carried home, and what the war cost them in ways that never stopped.
The film premiered at Sundance 2026 and has since screened at True/False, Full Frame, DC/DOX, and the Sarasota Film Festival, where it won the top documentary prize. It is based on a bestselling memoir by Ed Emanuel, one of the unit’s veterans, whose participation gave the filmmakers access to a story that, as Kino Lorber’s chief distribution officer Lisa Schwartz noted, had somehow never been told. “It was unbelievable that the story of this incredible group of veterans had not been told long ago,” she said.
Harper was direct about what the film meant to make. “Ed Emanuel trusted us with a story that he and these soldiers have carried quietly for half a century, and our hope has always been that the film could help restore their place in history.”
The documentary is produced by Sam Bisbee, Danielle Massie, Harper himself, rapper and entrepreneur Nasir Jones (Nas), and Peter Bittenbender. Executive producers include Davis Guggenheim and Geralyn White Dreyfous, among others.
This marks Kino Lorber’s second Sundance acquisition of 2026, following Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana. The independent distributor has been on a run: their documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature earlier this year.
Vietnam War documentaries occupy a particular position in American cinema — some have been canonical (The Fog of War, Dear America), others forgotten. What tends to separate the ones that endure is specificity: not “the war” in the abstract, but these people, this experience, these costs. Soul Patrol appears to have that specificity. What it adds — the reunion structure, the footage of men watching their own history — could make it genuinely affecting.
Awards season is a long way from May. But Kino Lorber knows how to position a documentary. And this story has been waiting long enough.
