Iraq Paper Scissors

From combat uniforms to handmade paper: veterans reclaim their own stories.

Human hands carry a distinctive and intimate language as tools of material transformation. Iraq Paper Scissors draws on this idea, using the physical act of making as a cinematic and emotional framework for understanding what veterans carry home from war.

The film documents the Combat Paper Project, a workshop conceived at the Green Door Studio in Vermont by founders Drew Matott and Iraq veteran Drew Cameron. In the spirit of building a new community outside military culture, Iraq War veterans gather to cut, beat and pulp their own combat uniforms into handmade paper, books and works of art. The process moves through three distinct phases: the deconstruction of the uniform, the transformation of its fibres into new material, and the creation of art and writing from that material.

Director Sara Nesson follows five young veterans who struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder as they work through the project. Over the course of her filming, she captures the young men and women deconstructing their uniforms while sharing their memories as soldiers and their uncertain futures as civilians. Through this creative and emotionally demanding process, the weight of war begins to give way, and those who served assert their right to be seen and understood beyond their military roles.

The film connects to Nesson's wider body of work on Iraq War veterans and the psychological aftermath of combat. It serves as a companion piece to her Oscar-nominated documentary Poster Girl, with which it was originally conceived as a single film before being separated into two independent works. Where Poster Girl focuses on one veteran's individual story, Iraq Paper Scissors takes a broader view of collective healing, placing creative practice at the centre of the veterans' experience of recovery and reintegration.