Don McCarthy was 20 years old on D-Day, when his infantry division landed on Omaha Beach. Don and the other veterans who survived D-Day will soon have passed into memory and legend. This realization inspires 20-year-old filmmaker Charlotte Juergens to join Don and seven other D-day vets on a journey to France – a commemorative pilgrimage to Omaha Beach for the 70th anniversary of the invasion.
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. In capturing their lives, Charlotte’s film offers a new, intergenerational perspective on D-Day, presenting the memories of 90-year-old combat veterans through the eyes of a 20-year-old woman.
Charlotte Juergens is an award-winning independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to several short films, Charlotte directed the documentary feature Sunken Roads: Three Generations After D-Day, which is represented by First Run Features and will premiere theatrically in New York City and Los Angeles on Veterans’ Day 2021. Charlotte also works as an archival producer for films, theater, and museum exhibits. In that capacity, she collaborated on three projects that will premiere this year: the feature-length documentary How the Monuments Came Down, an exhibit titled New York, New Sounds for the Museum of the City of New York, and an immersive theater experience called Margarita Live. Her past archival work ranges from the Oscar-nominated short documentary Joe’s Violin to two years as a research specialist at NBC News Archives. Charlotte will begin her Ph.D. in American Culture at the University of Michigan in fall 2021, where she will study American commemorations of contested history. She holds an M.A. in History from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in History from Yale.
