Remote Surveillance Trailer in Lakeview, OR

Lakeview will soon host the world premiere of a searing documentary filmed in its own backyard. On Saturday, Aug. 1, locals and visitors alike will gather at the Alger Theater for a showing of “Unseen,” which follows five veterans on a bikepacking journey across the rugged terrain of the Oregon Timber Trail. Their trek began in Lakeview, and as the documentary’s website notes, “From this sacred starting point, the veterans launch the Freedom to Roam project: a 200-mile odyssey through ancestral lands, volcanic plateaus, and alpine forests.”

While that story alone provides more than enough material for an epic documentary, “Unseen” is about much more.

The five veteran riders seek to recognize and honor the U.S. 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion — America’s first Black smokejumpers, who were dispatched to Oregon’s forests during World War II. They were on a covert mission called Operation Firefly — “protecting this very land from Japanese incendiary balloon bombs at a time when their country denied them the right to fight as combat soldiers overseas,” a news release about “Unseen” explains.

Members of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion “parachuted into burning forests to save a nation that had not yet decided to save them,” the release describes. “Their bravery was classified. Their names, forgotten. Their sacrifice, erased. Today, as five veterans pedal through the same wilderness those men protected with their lives, their ghosts ride alongside. The Oregon Timber Trail becomes something more than a route. It becomes a corridor of memory. A long-overdue act of remembrance.”

The film is written and directed by filmmaker Chad Brown, who shared some of the inspiration behind it.

“There are stories in this country that have been deliberately buried — packed down under decades of convenience and comfortable forgetting — and if nobody’s going to dig for them, then somebody who gives a damn has to. That’s what I do,” he described in his director’s statement. “I translate the complex into the human. I look for the thing that connects the veteran on a bike in the middle of nowhere to the smokejumper who parachuted into a burning forest eighty years ago.”

Brown’s statement explains how learning about the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion affected him and how he seeks to honor their story with his film: “When I first encountered their history — America’s first Black airborne unit, deployed to protect Oregon’s forests while being denied the right to serve as combat soldiers, their mission classified, their names stripped from the record — I felt something shift in me that has not shifted back.

“These men were extraordinary. They were disciplined, fearless, and deeply patriotic in the most uncompromising sense of the word: they served a country that had not yet earned their devotion, and they did it with grace and precision and fire. The Oregon Timber Trail runs through land they protected. Every mile of it is theirs. This film is my way of handing that land back to them. Of saying: we see you now. We will not forget again.”

“The story of the Triple Nickles was largely erased from popular history. Most Americans — including many veterans — have never heard their name,” the news release states, noting that “Unseen” exists, in part, to change that. “When five veterans ride 200 miles through the Oregon wilderness in the Triple Nickles’ honor, they are not only completing an expedition — they are performing an act of remembrance. They are picking up a torch that was dropped by history and refusing to let it go dark.

“The film is the record of that refusal. And audiences who walk into a theater for UNSEEN will walk out knowing a name, and a story, they will not forget.”

The world premiere of “Unseen” will be held at the Alger Theater in Lakeview on Saturday, Aug. 1 at 6 p.m. Tickets are $15. To purchase a ticket to the premiere, visit tinyurl.com/UnseenLakeview. To view the film’s trailer, visit tinyurl.com/unseendoctrailer.