“A quietly powerful exploration of why we keep moving forward, despite everything.”

Al Moon is a Native American who lives a quiet, solitary life on the land of the Yurok Nation in California. His way of living is increasingly threatened by political shifts beyond the borders of his reservation, and their devastating impact on the environment. These constant, violent changes force Al to ask himself daily: how can I continue living this life under such conditions? But then, there is also Al the Vietnam War veteran, a complicated man who prides himself on never touching a gun since the war, despite being an exceptional marksman. And while he refrains from gun use, he isn’t entirely critical of the Second Amendment or the right to bear arms, even if the modern interpretation often forgets the original purpose for which the law was written.

In many ways, Al Moon is a deeply conflicted figure, navigating the traumas of being a Native American in a country that continues to marginalize his people, while also grappling with the long-lasting psychological scars of war. Hence, as members of the Yurok Nation fall ill from environmental disasters, Al’s war trauma begins to resurface, and in an attempt to reconcile these parts of himself he sets off across America to reconnect with former squad members and address unresolved wrongs from a bygone era. Thus, Isabelle Ingold and Vivianne Perelmuter’s New Beginnings can be understood as an ambitious and meditative dive into the mind of a man beginning a cross-country journey to confront the ghosts of his past.

Yet, as New Beginnings makes clear from the very first interview, there is no certainty that one can ever be cured of such inner turmoil. And perhaps this is the film’s greatest strength, its ability to explore, through Al’s story, a society deeply divided without romanticizing the past. Has there ever truly been a time when things were different? That is, Al is now an older man, burdened by PTSD and increasingly concerned about the state of his Nation’s territory. In one scene Donald Trump appears on television, talking about fighting an undefined ‘evil’ and why all Americans should be armed, and Al begins to understand how the ethnic group he belongs to might be seen, intentionally or not, as a manifestation of that vague, imagined threat. After all, historically guns were often pointed at Native people, rarely held by them. In other words, the present mirrors past struggles.

But all of this is approached apropos of a broader existential question: why did he, as a Native American, serve in a white man’s war? Why did he go to Vietnam in the first place? In this climate, paranoia grows. And Al constantly describes his fear of something foul and evil that might come from anywhere, in any form, from anyone. As Tommy Orange wrote in There There:

“We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.”

So as Al begins his journey to reunite with other veterans, Ingold and Perelmuter expand the scope of their film. Along the road, we meet others, all broken in their own ways, wandering America with their own traumas. But the focus remains on Al, who becomes both participant and interviewer, shaping the narrative through his questions and observations. In this way, New Beginnings becomes not just a portrait of Al the Native American or Al the Vietnam veteran, but of Al the storyteller, the documentarian of his own life.

Through these encounters we learn more about Al: how he fled home at age eleven, moved from one foster home to another, struggled with alcohol, and eventually taught himself how to drink socially again. Curiously, it’s only through these exchanges with others that the film fully reveals his past, carefully avoiding the creation of a mythic hero – a man who once fought for his country and now fights for his people.

So, why did he go to Vietnam? And why does his PTSD intensify as the environmental crises around him worsen? In a tragic accident Al killed his own brother; enlisting in the war was for him a form of penance, or a search for death, and a punishment that suicide couldn’t provide. But as history often shows us, life doesn’t follow a narrative logic. Bullets that killed many of his comrades passed by Al without touching him. So he came back. He grew older. And now he is left to confront the question that has haunted him ever since: how do I live this life?

In the end, New Beginnings is a masterful character study, not only of Al Moon but of a fractured society. It’s a quietly powerful exploration of why we keep moving forward, despite everything. It is a film that succeeds because Ingold and Perelmuter offer no sensationalism, no dramatization. They simply follow a man, with patience and empathy, as he slowly unravels his life’s greatest mystery.