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A rare and intimate documentary about "The Good War" - one man who fought it and another who refused to.

The attack on Pearl Harbor radically altered American consciousness. George Rarey and Bob Harvey were both artists in Greenwich Village until that day changed their lives forever in radically different ways: Rarey became a fighter pilot who never missed a mission and Harvey a conscientious objector to the war.

In FOOLS AND HEROES the granddaughter the two men had in common tells their illuminating stories. Rich with rare archival footage, songs and artwork from the period, as well as interviews with those who shared Rarey's and Harvey's experiences, the film provides intimate psychological portraits of two exceptional men whose lives were tragically affected by "The Good War."

Ultimately words such as hero and fool lose their meaning as the consequences of Rarey and Harvey's choices make tangible the dilemmas that war presents to men and women everywhere in every age.

FOOLS AND HEROES is a 60-minute documentary directed and edited by Ondine Rarey and Luigi Falorni and co-produced by the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film and Bavarian Television in Munich, Germany.

"The film does a particularly fine job of visually interpreting the reality of social convention. I found it particularly moving because I had believed the Vietnam War to be the first one in which resisters played an important role, yet this film has caused me to wonder what the historical connection might be between WWII resisters and their more vocal value-mates during the Vietnam War."

—Susan Hillier, Professor of Psychology, Sonoma State University


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