Kino Lorber released the teaser trailer for Soul Patrol on Tuesday, ahead of the documentary’s November 6 theatrical release. Directed by J.M. Harper, the film follows the surviving members of Company F, 51st Infantry, the Vietnam War’s first all-Black Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol team, as they reunite at a hotel on the 50th anniversary of the war.
The documentary draws on raw Super 8 footage, personal photographs, and audio recordings from the unit’s own archives to reconstruct missions the men carried out deep behind enemy lines between 1968 and 1969. The project traces back to veteran Ed Emanuel, who wrote the 2003 memoir Soul Patrol: The Riveting True Story of the First African American LRRP Team in Vietnam, which inspired Harper to pursue the film; Emanuel also serves as an executive producer. Harper previously directed As We Speak and co-directed jeen-yuhs, and won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival for this project before further festival runs at DC/DOX and DOC NYC.
The documentary centers directly on a story that’s remained largely absent from decades of Vietnam War filmmaking: an elite Black combat unit given unprecedented access to tell its own account, in its own archival materials, rather than being folded into a broader, more generalized war narrative. That specificity extends into the film’s structure itself, which doesn’t attempt to represent the entire American experience of Vietnam, but focuses narrowly on what the war meant for these men, including the unresolved contradiction of risking their lives for a country still denying them equal treatment at home.
The film runs 100 minutes and is produced by Harper, Sam Bisbee, Peter Bittenbender, Nas, and Danielle Massie. Kino Lorber will open the film in select theaters November 6, with additional special screenings scheduled for Veterans Day, November 11.
With the film’s theatrical run landing on both the war’s 50th anniversary and Veterans Day, Soul Patrol arrives asking audiences to reckon with a story that’s gone largely untold for half a century, and whether its release can finally give these veterans’ account the wider recognition it’s been denied.