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NO APOLOGIES
The Education of Gary Reed Meyer
No Apologies is an unflinching look into the life of a 59 year Vietnam veteran from South Minneapolis.
The film engages Gary Meyer's life in February of 2008 as he nears the end of eight years of study at the University of Minnesota. The film follows Gary though his Master's Degree in Adult Education, and then onto Thailand, where he is accepted into the Doctoral program in Human Resource Development at Burapha University.
I met Gary in 2003 in Australia. We were both exchange students in the same program at Murdoch University. Before that he conducted field research and did semesters abroad in Mexico, Laos and Venezuela. He would go on to study in Thailand, France, and Ethiopia. Gary Meyer is a non-traditional student.
The film follows Gary through a two month tour of Thailand, Laos and Vietnam at the end of 2008. On the trip, Gary settles in at Burapha University, reunites with his girlfriend in Laos, and returns to Vietnam for the first time since he was a soldier there with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in 1968.
The film also examines Gary's tumultuous past. His adoption at birth. The quarter century he spent as a concrete mason that left him with a titanium knee joint and a nerve-damaged, atrophied right calf; ailments that have given him a marionette-like limp powered more by raw will than any muscle and sinew. We talk with Gary's children and ex-wife and explore a 15 year crack-cocaine addiction that devastated his marriage and estranged his children.
This is also the story of four independent filmmakers who came together to document Gary's journey of redemption. Only to find that in the shadow of every triumph, there is heartbreak. And sometimes at the root of a legend, there is a flawed, breakable man just struggling to find what we all seek: a place to belong.
