An Ohio University alumna whose documentaries traced her family’s decades-long search for her missing father will bring those films home to Athens for Veterans Day. Ohio University announced on November 5 that Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Robin Smith, a 1972 Ohio University graduate, will return to the Athena Cinema on Wednesday, November 11, for a Veterans Day screening of her documentaries “He’s Only Missing” (1978) and “Letting Go” (1995).
The evening begins with a reception with Smith at 7 p.m., followed by the screenings at 7:30 p.m. at the Athena on Court Street in uptown Athens. Smith will introduce the films and take part in a conversation about her work and her family’s search afterward, according to Ohio University’s November 5 announcement. The event is still to come — the films screen on Veterans Day itself, a fitting date for a story rooted in military service and loss.
Both films chronicle the Smith family’s search for answers about her father, U.S. Marine Corps Col. Robert N. Smith, whose plane was shot down over North Vietnam in 1969 and who was declared Missing in Action. “He’s Only Missing,” Smith’s first film, explores what Ohio University describes as the “state of limbo” the family lived in, uncertain whether he was dead or alive. “Letting Go” (1995) follows Smith as the first information about her father’s fate began to emerge and she traveled to Vietnam with a CBS News crew to visit the site where his plane had crashed.
Athens is not just a tour stop for Smith — it is where her family waited. Her mother was from Nelsonville and moved the family to Athens to await her father’s return, and Smith was an Ohio University student during the war years. “It was a turbulent time to be a student on campus eager to participate in conversations about resistance to war while my own father could possibly be a POW in the Hanoi Hilton,” Smith told the Athens County Independent in March. “Making the film was an opportunity for deep soul searching and is an integral part of the story.”
“Athens is the perfect place to showcase my films,” Smith told the Athens County Independent, saying the showing honors the “personal stories that we shared as a community.” The two films first screened together at the Athena in March for Ohio Goes to the Movies and Vietnam Veterans Day; the November 11 event is a separate Veterans Day return announced this week, giving Athens audiences who missed March another chance to see them with the filmmaker present.
Smith’s career grew directly out of that first film. After CBS acquired the rights to “He’s Only Missing,” she began her broadcast journalism career with CBS News Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt, Ohio University said. She earned a master’s from Boston University in 1978, founded the nonprofit production company video|action in 1990, and has earned numerous awards including an Emmy. She now serves on the Chaddock + Morrow College of Fine Arts Leadership Council and as a trustee on the Ohio University Foundation Board.
What happens next is the Veterans Day evening itself: reception at 7 p.m., films at 7:30 p.m., and the filmmaker conversation afterward at the Athena Cinema on Wednesday, November 11. Event information is available through the Athena Cinema, linked from Ohio University’s announcement — a homecoming, more than 50 years after Smith left campus in 1972, in the town where her family once waited for news.
Photo: Chamberednautilus, CC BY-SA 4.0