Help us tell the story of Veterans trying to find themselves after service!
When you serve in the military, your life has structure. You know what to wear, where to stand, when to move, and what mission comes next. You have a role. A purpose. A crew.
Then one day, you get out.
For many Veterans, separation from service is not just a career change. It is an identity collapse. The person you were trained to become may no longer fit anywhere. The mission ends. The structure disappears. The people who once surrounded you scatter. And some Veterans begin to disappear from view entirely.
Finding Harding: Lost at Shore is a feature documentary about that disappearance.
I'm Andrew B Church, a U.S. Navy Veteran, filmmaker, and former shipmate of Tyler Harding. He was one of my closest friends in the Navy — funny, charismatic, and the kind of person who could make the hardest days survivable. After leaving Active Duty, he became unreachable. His social media went silent. His phone number was recycled. For more than a decade, I wondered what happened to him.
This film follows my search for Harding. But the search is also a way into a larger story: what happens to Veterans after the uniform comes off, when the structure, purpose, and belonging of military life are suddenly gone.
Through intimate interviews, road-trip investigation, archival material, and cinematic storytelling, Finding Harding explores Veteran reintegration, isolation, trauma, homelessness, addiction, military sexual trauma (MST), and the long process of rediscovering who you are after service.
We are raising $35,000 in immediate production support for Finding Harding: Lost at Shore. This support will help strengthen the cinematic sample scene, polish the trailer, support participant outreach. deepen story producing, prepare grant and funder materials, cover travel and logistics, support fiscal sponsorship and administration, and move the project toward active production.
Your support helps us take the next step toward telling this story with the care, honesty, and cinematic power it deserves.
This is more than a search for one missing shipmate.
It is a film about the Veterans who come home — and still feel lost.
Sometimes leaving the military means losing yourself.
Help us find Harding. Help us find what was lost.
