First to Fall follows a group of young civilian expatriate ‘rebels’ on their 8-month journey to liberate their home country. They give up comfortable, stable lives in order to take up arms against a corrupt regime and risk their lives in a brutal, chaotic war.

This video is a peek at the full length documentary which is an immersive journey through the revolution in Libya following two friends who leave their lives as students in Canada to return to their home country of Libya during the uprising. When the young men pick up guns for the first time, Hamid is 26 and Tarek only 21. Full of revolutionary fervor, the two friends join the rebel army on the front lines to fight Gaddafi and reach their families held under siege by his army. Hamid and Tarek experience the reality of warfare and find their lives forever altered. The Libyan revolution provides the backdrop for this intimate story about the larger lessons of war and the loss of innocence.

Rachel Anderson" When I started shooting I wanted to understand the young fighters. All waking hours I’d be right at their side. I stayed in Libya when most journalists left. The war changed my subjects, and as they hardened, my shooting became grittier; as they went to the front I was there; as they got tired I became exhausted. Just as my subjects’ attitudes fluctuated between levity and deadly seriousness—one moment joking over who’ll be the next martyr, the next paying respects for a dead friend—my film finds moments of humanity in the midst of the horrors of war."