DRAMA, comedy, documentary and animation will all be on parade when the Veterans Film Festival returns next month with a four-day program.

Over its five years, festival director Tom Papas has experimented with different locations, but this year the event is back at its natural home in the Australian War Memorial, with some screenings to take place for the first time at the National Film and Sound Archive.

The idea, Papas says, is to throw the spotlight on recent work by veterans and filmmakers who explore conflict and veterans’ themes. He is keen to emphasise the Q&A sessions associated with this year’s entries.

The closing gala night will feature the presentation of the festival’s Red Poppy Awards, exquisite trophies crafted by Canberra glass artist Annette Blair and inspired by the poem “In Flanders Fields the Poppies Blow.”

Apart from Australia, we’ll be seeing films from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, India, Iran, Iraq, NZ, Russian Federation, the UK and the US.

The festival opens with the Australian premiere of “Cry of Silence”, directed by Russia’s Vladimir Potapov, set in 1942 during the Leningrad blockade and will close with the Australian premiere of the US documentary, “The Interpreters”, which follows the lives of Iraqi and Afghan military interpreters who worked with US forces on the ground. 

A highlight, a Cannes favourite, will be the French film, “The Swallows of Kabul” (Les hirondelles de Kaboul), an animated adaptation of Yasmina Khadra’s novel of the same name set in 1998 Taliban-occupied Kabul.

Other films include “Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan”, set in a Vietnamese rubber plantation where 108 young and inexperienced Australian and NZ soldiers are fighting for their lives and “Escape and Evasion”, where a lone soldier returns home from Burma in search of solace but is forced by a journo to reveal the ghosts of his past. 

In “Mosul 980” from Iraq, a 17-year-old kidnapped Yazidi girl disguised in ISIS uniform tries to escape from ISIS.

An important aspect of the festival, Papas says, is his inclusion of films by real veterans now working as filmmakers and artists, such as “Darkest Corner” directed by Dave Beamish and Zac Loy from Australia in which two unlikely young saboteurs are trapped by a hostile extremist militia. 

Jason Trembath’s dystopian film “Carcerem” from Australia shows a young officer wanting to leave the desolate planet of Carcerem after completing his required tour of duty, but manipulated into staying by an obsessed commanding officer.

“Minor Accident of War” from the US is a true story written and narrated by the man who lived it, 95-year-old Edward Field, whose plane, on his third mission over Germany, lost all four engines and crash-landed in the North Sea. 

A special screening will be Tom Jeffrey’s classic, “The Odd Angry Shot,” starring Graham Kennedy, John Hargreaves, John Jarratt, Bryan Brown and Graeme Blundell, where in between drinking cans of Fosters beer, Aussie soldiers experience the war in Vietnam.

5th Veterans Film Festival, November 6-9, book at veteransfilmfestival.com