Written and Directed by Tara Johns
Produced by Rob Vroom
First Blood is a feature-length hybrid documentary that follows a deeply personal investigation into the execution of the filmmaker’s great-grandfather, Matthew Kehl, a German-Russian immigrant hanged in Alberta for the alleged murder of a peddler. Haunted by family silence and generational shame, the director embarks on a quest to uncover what really happened. At the heart of the film is the making of a narrative short inspired by this legacy—fiction that mirrors and challenges the documentary’s real-world search for truth. Moving between archival research, family testimony, filmmaking process, and a speculative AI-inflected drama about memory loss and inherited trauma, First Blood becomes both an excavation of family myth and a timely meditation on truth itself in the age of misinformation.