DECATUR — An award winning film opening Friday, March 27, at the Carmike Hickory Point Theatre in Forsyth features three brothers from a Decatur family. Brothers at War is Director Jake Rademacher’s look at the U.S. military in Iraq through his brothers’ eyes.

The film won Feature Documentary at the 2008 Washington D.C.’s G.I. Film Festival, and was Best Documentary and Grand Jury Prize winner of the Solstice Film Festival in Minneapolis.

While Jake, a 1993 St. Teresa High School graduate, and 1997 University of Notre Dame graduate, was pursuing a career in the film industry, two of his brothers, Isaac and Joe, were serving their country in the military. Both had been in Iraq. Isaac is also a St. Teresa graduate, and a 2000 graduate of West Point. Joe, who is 10 years younger than Jake, enlisted in the Army when he was 17.

After they came home from war the first time, Jake said, “I could see and feel the change, the new distance between us. When they told me what I was watching in 30-second blips on the news was not the same war they were fighting, I knew them well enough to know we were all missing something.”

“Jake had the idea he wanted to do a movie to give the American soldiers’ perspective while at war in Iraq,” said Dennis Rademacher, the brothers’ dad and a member of Ss. James and Patrick Parish.

Producer Norman Powell said he would consider doing it, but it would cost a bare bones $400,000.

“Jake came home and raised all the money within six weeks, from hard-nosed businessmen in the Midwest. Almost all the initial financing came from either people in Decatur, or relatives in Decatur,” said Dennis .

Executive producers are David Scantling and CSI New York actor Gary Sinese