How Can Third Culture Kids Belong? Brats: Our Journey Home

Join us for our teleconference with Donna Musil – Army Brat/ATCK, writer, director and producer of Brats: Our Journey Home.

"It's about us .... about "belonging" to something special and it is gripping." --Glenda Casey Petrini, HHS '54, on Donna Musil's Army Brats documentary

Have you lived outside your Passport culture and then struggled trying to fit in with people that you have nothing in common with when you returned “home”?

In this 60-mins interview, you will learn about:

1. How to be comfortable with who you are – that completely opposing ideas are valid and exist all at the same time.

2. How to fully employ your strengths and have compassion for your weaknesses.

3. How to look at “belonging” in a whole new light.

About Donna Musil

BRATS is the first cinematic glimpse into a global subculture whose journey to adulthood is a high-octane mixture of incredible excitement and enormous pain.

It's the seven-year work of passion of independent filmmaker Donna Musil. It's the first film Donna has directed and produced. Before embarking on BRATS, Donna wrote a variety of scripts, including Ananse, a children's animated film based on African folktales, in development with Visionex/Ghana and Melendez Films/London. She co-directed a staged reading of her original feature, To Kingdom Come, with Producer Judith Pearlman, in NY Women in Film & TV's Screenplay Reading Series, representing "some of the best developing women screenwriters."

Prior to her writing career, Donna worked as an attorney with the AFL-CIO and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, helping organize unions throughout the South. She has a J.D. and B.A./Journalism (magna cum laude) from the University of Georgia and is a member of the State Bar of Georgia.

Donna was raised an Army brat and has lived and worked in Germany, Korea, Ireland, Copenhagen, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and Paris. As a child, she moved 12 times in 16 years. Her father was a JAG officer and military judge. When she was 16, her father died, and two weeks later, her family moved to Columbus, Georgia, where she finished high school.

For the next 20 years, Donna moved 19 times, graduated college, and worked in a variety of jobs, but always felt "different" from her fellow Americans. In 1997, she learned that she was not alone. While surfing the Internet, Donna discovered a Web site for her Taegu, Korea high school. A few weeks later, she attended an impromptu reunion in Washington, DC. It was revelatory. For the first time, Donna felt like she "belonged" somewhere, and thus began her journey "home."

Sign up to get the recording of TCK Academy's Paulette M. Bethel's interview with Donna Musil.

"It made emotion well up in my chest and throat and I wasn't able to speak until the very end when I asked a question. " I've never taken part in a conference that catered so narrowly to my own experience as with the third TCKid Teleconference with Donna Musil. It made emotion well up in my chest and throat and I wasn't able to speak until the very end when I asked a question. Thank you, Donna, Paulette and Brice for another healing experience, once which motivated me to begin organizing a TCK Meet-Up in my area. - Jan, Port Moody