This Is Not A Draft heads to the Big City!
This Thursday, This Is Not A Draft will screen at The North Film Festival - New York City as an Official Selection, and our team couldn’t be more excited to bring these important veteran stories to audiences in the heart of Manhattan.
Producers Club and Theater
Our screening will take place at 9:00 PM on Thursday, June 11, at the historic Producers Club Theaters in New York City’s Theater District. The festival brings together filmmakers from around the world to celebrate creativity, storytelling, and independent cinema, making it an incredible honor to have This Is Not A Draft included among this year’s selections. The North Film Festival runs June 10-13 and showcases films from a diverse range of voices and perspectives. (TNFF NY City)
For our team, New York City is more than just another stop on the festival circuit.
For many of the veterans featured in This Is Not A Draft, the events of September 11, 2001, became a defining moment that influenced their decision to serve. The skyline, the memorials, and the city itself remain powerful symbols of both loss and resilience. Bringing this documentary to New York feels especially meaningful because it allows these stories to be shared in one of the places that inspired so many Americans to put on the uniform.
Over the past several years, we have traveled across the country capturing stories from veterans, service members, military families, and researchers. Their experiences reveal not only the sacrifices made in service to our nation but also the challenges of navigating life after military service. While the film explores difficult topics—including trauma, loss, and the invisible wounds of war—it is ultimately a story about community, resilience, and hope.
The opportunity to screen in New York is another important milestone in the film’s journey. Following our sold-out screening and Best Feature Length Documentary win at the Chandler International Film Festival, we are honored to continue sharing these stories with new audiences and engaging in conversations about the veteran experience.
To everyone who has supported this project—from our participants and crew members to the veterans who trusted us with their stories—thank you. This moment belongs to all of you.
If you’re in New York City this week, we would love to see you at the screening.
Get your tickets here: https://filmfreeway.com/TheNorthFilmFestNYC/tickets
This Is Not A Draft
Thursday, June 11, 2026
9:00 PM
Producers Club Theaters
358 West 44th Street
New York, NY 10036 (TNFF NY City)
We’ll see you in the Big Apple.
— Jack Blair
Director, This Is Not A Draft
Happy Jack Media
Chandler International Film Festival
Best Documentary Feature Film!
We are incredibly honored to share that This Is Not A Draft has won Best Feature Documentary at the Chandler International Film Festival. CIFF Celebrate their 10th anniversary this year and we were so excited to be able to participate in all of the coffee connections, educational sessions from professionals in the industry, and best of all screening our fellow independent filmmakers films on the big screen!
What makes this award especially meaningful is how this film and this team came together.
Several members of our crew first met through Arizona State University and the Sidney Poitier New American Film School. That shared foundation became the starting point for a collaboration rooted in trust, creativity, and a shared commitment to telling meaningful stories. Moments in classrooms, and capstone projects helped develop the skills, perseverance and passion that made This Is Not A Draft a possibility.
Shawn Banzhaf, Jack Blair, Eric Eldridge, Andrew Baker, and Marcus Ferguson
I want to sincerely thank ASU for investing in a film program that not only teaches the craft, but also brings people together — people who go on to create work with purpose, empathy, and impact. This film exists because of that ecosystem and the relationships it fostered. Filmmaking is a team sport, it takes every member of the team to make these films memorable and amazing!
To have this documentary received so warmly by audiences, especially Veterans, to be recognized in this way is deeply humbling. The film embodies the power of hope to spark healing and create opportunities at scale, reflecting a shared commitment to inclusion, meaningful impact, and public value. This work honors the idea that transformative storytelling can strengthen social and mental health well-being. I am profoundly grateful for the collaborators, the communities we serve, and all who continue to uplift this work with purpose, integrity, and healing.
Thank you for watching, thank you for supporting, and thank you for doing your part to create a stronger community, where we support each other, and make this world a better place!
Onward. 🎥
🍂 Thanksgiving Update 🍂
As we approach Thanksgiving, I’ve been reflecting on this past year — a year filled with growth, gratitude, and moments that reminded me why I started This Is Not A Draft in the first place.
I’m thankful for the Veterans who opened their lives and shared their stories with honesty, courage, and vulnerability. Every interview, every conversation, and every moment on camera has reinforced just how important it is to tell these stories with care and integrity.
Over the past year, our team has made tremendous progress:
We continued filming across the country, from Washington, D.C. to Arizona, capturing powerful interviews and community-driven experiences.
We deepened the film’s three-act structure — Motivation to Serve, Price of Service, and Life After Service — refining the emotional journey and adding expert insight from Dr. Rebecca Blais, whose research on Veteran suicide brings essential context to the documentary.
We documented meaningful work happening in the Veteran community, including Treks 4 Vets and other organizations dedicated to reconnection, healing, and hope.
We interviewed a Veteran couple who served in Iraq together and later married — a reminder of how service shapes lives and relationships in unexpected ways.
And one of the most exciting milestones of all: This Is Not A Draft was selected for the Florence International Film Festival, where we’ll have the opportunity to share these stories with international audiences.
I’m also grateful to everyone who has supported this project — from the families who attended screenings and shared heartfelt feedback, to the friends, collaborators, and contributors who continue to believe in this film’s impact. Your encouragement has kept this project moving forward, especially during the long nights of editing, planning, and refining.
This journey has reaffirmed something I believe deeply: community gives us hope. Whether it’s Veterans reconnecting with each other, supporters helping lift this project off the ground, or people simply reaching out after a screening — you’ve all helped build a community around this film, and I’m profoundly thankful for that.
As we close out the year, I’m excited to continue editing, scoring, and preparing the film for additional festival opportunities. There’s more to come, and I can’t wait to share every step with you.
Thank you for being part of this story.
Wishing you and your loved ones a meaningful and connected Thanksgiving.
— Jack
Director, This Is Not A Draft
We’re headed to Italia!
We’re honored to share that This Is Not A Draft has been officially selected to screen at the Florence International Film Festival in Florence, Italy.
This film has been a labor of love from the start — a journey through the hearts and histories of post-9/11 Veterans, their reasons for raising their hands, the costs carried home, and the power of community that helps them rebuild. To have this story recognized on an international stage feels both humbling and deeply affirming — a reminder that truth and compassion travel far beyond borders.
Endless gratitude to everyone who helped bring this project to life — the veterans who entrusted us with their stories, our extraordinary crew, and the community that continues to show up with heart and purpose.
🎥 This Is Not A Draft continues its mission to spark conversation, build connection, and honor those who serve — in every form that service takes.
#ThisIsNotADraft #FlorenceInternationalFilmFestival #VeteranStories #DocumentaryFilm #HappyJackMedia #IndependentFilm #FilmFestival #FilmmakerLife #VeteranCommunity
And That’s A Wrap
Hey, folks! Wow, it’s been almost a year since we started this journey, and it’s been a wild ride. Our first interviewee was also our last - we started off by interviewing Shawn Banzhaf in June of 2024, and we finished up his last interview this past Saturday, April 26th, 2025.
The First Interview
Shawn shared his Act I with us in the hot June summer heat at the Pat Tillman Veterans Center, ASU Mountain America Stadium.
By the time we made it to his Act III Interview
the team was used to working in wild locales, mountains, deserts, beaches. Come rain or shine we turned out.
Now that principle photography is over, we are putting our heads down and pushing forward through the post production phase. That means that over the next two months we’ll be find this best moments of our interviews with Shawn, Cheryl, Eric, Grant, Cris, Danny and Karen and Melvin all of the awesome Vets who shared their stories with us! Also, a big shoutout to Dr. Becky Blais from ASU who shared with us the findings from her years of studies around active duty service members and Veterans and Reservists.
This journey has been amazing, and at the heart of it was a desire to share Veteran stories and prevent Veteran suicide. As we’ve traveled the last year, it’s been really impactful to speak to members of the community and hear their stories of being personally impacted by Veteran suicide. It opened up my eyes and made me realize how important a topic this is and that we can’t stop talking about Veteran suicide and doing whatever we can to prevent it. Building strong communities for veterans is critical, and so we want to bring awareness to this issue, and encourage Veterans to seek out other Veterans. It’s easy to lose touch with Veteran community, especially after transitioning out of the military, and even more-so in a Post-Covid world. So join us in fighting Veteran suicide, because we don’t leave each other behind.
Ready to Launch
Hey folks, thanks for stopping by! We are really excited to announce that we are in full-on production mode now and have closed out our pre-production period! So now that we are in production mode, we have launched our crowd funding! We are thrilled to be able to start capturing these stories of folks across the nation. We will be filming in Arizona again on October 5th and then we’re heading to San Diego to film some great stories there October 11th-13th.
November will be a busy month with lots of Veteran’s Day activities and we are excited to connect with as many Vets as we can to tell their stories.
In addition to cataloguing our stories through Documentary form we’ll also be collecting answers and questions in order to upload to the Library of Congress’ Veterans’ History Project. They have a toolkit that helps you know what questions to ask when you’re doing your own recordings.
We love this project and are excited to contribute our stories to it as well!
Here’s the link to support if you can: https://gofund.me/65611c1b
If you can’t donate you can still support the film by sharing with your community!
This Is Not A Draft
It all begins with an idea.
It all began with an idea. I was interviewing a Veteran for my podcast and I realized that I wanted to bring the story to a larger audience. I wanted to honor the sacrifice of so many, and highlight the courage, resilience and hope that our Veterans live and breathe. The process of talking to these Veterans has been extremely therapeutic for me.
Ian Scott Blair 11/21/2009 - 05/21/2014
May 21, 2024 marked 10 years since my son, Ian Scott Blair, had been killed. I was deployed in Afghanistan in 2014 when he was tragically killed. The fallout of my sons death took me over a decade to process, and still hurts to this day.
This year when marking Ian’s passing I challenged myself and my wife Jennie to make this the year that we share our story. Jennie is working on writing a book about our experiences and her experience as a Veteran Caretaker and I am focused on telling my and other Veteran stories through the documentary, “This Is Not A Draft”.
So I hope that you’ll join us this year as we gather stories from other Veterans and craft them, we could really use your support in getting the message out.
Follow along for behind the scenes photos and videos as we travel across the United States telling the stories of our wonderful Post 9/11 Veterans.
This Is Not A Draft Crew Members