''The Millionaires' Unit'' is a 2015 American

documentary film A documentary film (often described simply as a documentary) is a nonfiction Film, motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". The American author and ...

by Darroch Greer and Ron King about the

First Yale Unit The First Yale Unit, also known as the Yale Aero Club (formally designated Aerial Coast Patrol No. 1), was originally a student airplane flying club started by Yale University sophomore F. Trubee Davison in June 1916. Davison and 11 other Yale s ...

, a group of

Yale Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and one of the nine colonial colleges ch ...

college students who took the initiative to learn to fly in preparation for America's entry into the Great War. Based on a book by author Marc Wortman, the film is narrated by Academy Award-nominated actor

Bruce Dern Bruce MacLeish Dern (born June 4, 1936) is an American actor. He has received several accolades, including the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor and the Silver Bear for Best Actor. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Suppo ...

. It was filmed in the U.S., England, France, Belgium and New Zealand over the course of seven years. The documentary charts the romantic, little-known story of the origins of American airpower and features sequences filmed air-to-air with original WW1 planes.

Release

The film won the Best Documentary Feature honor at the 2015 G.I. Film Festival and the Garden State Film Festival. It also screened at the Kansas City Film Festival, the Newport Beach Film Festival and the Julien Dubuque Film Festival, as well as at numerous museums and the Experimental Aircraft Association's

AirVenture EAA AirVenture Oshkosh (formerly the EAA Annual Convention and Fly-In), or just Oshkosh, is an annual air show and gathering of aviation enthusiasts held each summer at the Wittman Regional Airport and adjacent Pioneer Airport in Oshkosh, Wiscon ...

event.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Millionaires' Unit, The 2015 films Documentary films about World War I Films shot in New Zealand 2010s English-language films