HEROIC moved London preview audiences with a documentary about art, beauty, remembrance, and the making of Washington, D.C.’s National WWI Memorial.
SALT LAKE CITY, UT, UNITED STATES, July 3, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — The lights came up on HEROIC at the ARC Conference on June 24, and for a long moment, no one in the room moved. Then they stood. Traci L. Slatton‘s documentary chronicling Master Sculptor Sabin Howard’s nine-year creation of America’s National WWI Memorial received its special preview before an audience that had spent three days asking what it would take to rebuild Western civilization — and found, in 58.5 feet of bronze, an answer no panel or paper had given them.
The screening was followed by a live Q&A hosted by Charles Mostow, Sabin Howard’s apprentice sculptor and the film’s assistant director, in conversation with director and international bestselling author Traci L. Slatton. What unfolded was not a standard post-screening exchange. It became, by the account of attendees, an emotionally direct conversation — audience members not merely asking questions, but testifying.
One man described the statues in his hometown removed under cover of darkness — “literally in the middle of the night,” he told the room — and the silence that has occupied those public spaces ever since. “The parks just echo emptiness now,” he said. Others admitted they had simply never understood what it took to build something permanent: the nine years, the pandemic, the federal bureaucracy, the sheer will required to deliver 25 tons of bronze on time and on budget against odds that, as one attendee put it, “should have killed the project a dozen times over.”
“I have listened to talks about reconstruction for three days. Tonight I watched it happen, in real time, on a screen. That is a different kind of argument. You cannot un-see it.”
— HEROIC Screening Attendee, following the screening
The response landed precisely where ARC 2026 had spent three days building toward. Day One of the conference traced what speakers called the “pathway to deconstruction” — the erosion of confidence in the Western story. Day Two examined the mindset shift required to reverse it. Sabin Howard himself addressed the conference directly, arguing that art reflects ideology: that beauty reveals order and points toward truths a fragmented culture has stopped reaching for. HEROIC arrived as the demonstration of that argument — not a thesis about beauty’s importance, but 4,000 hours of evidence that beauty still gets made, against impossible odds, by people who refuse to let it die.
“I built A Soldier’s Journey in service of something infinitely greater than myself. It is an American memorial, but World War I belongs to the memory of the world. Twenty-two million people were lost, and at the heart of the sculpture is a question: what happens to human beings, and to civilization, when we forget the sacred worth of the human person? HEROIC shows what it took to make that question visible in bronze: the faith, the resistance, the failures, the discipline and the refusal to quit. That is why people should see this film.”
— Sabin Howard, Master Sculptor, A Soldier’s Journey, National World War I Memorial
Several attendees connected the film directly to anxieties they had carried into the conference: a rising tide of nihilism among the young, the isolating effects of social media, the disorienting speed of artificial intelligence, a generation increasingly unsure what, if anything, is worth building toward. Against that backdrop, the film’s reception became something larger than a film review. It became, in the words of more than one attendee, a reason to keep hoping — proof that meaning, beauty, and permanence are still achievable, not relics of a civilization in retreat but evidence of what is still possible when someone refuses to give up on them.
“My daughter is twenty-one now. She was the little girl at the beginning and end of A Soldier’s Journey — the one looking into her father’s helmet, divining what comes next. I watched her grow up alongside that sculpture, and I think about her every time someone asks me why this film matters. I want hope to soar in her heart. I want her to walk through this extraordinary world — this improbable, beautiful orb we’ve been given — and feel grateful for it, not anxious about it. I want her to look toward the future with enough hope that it becomes contagious, that she can hand it to someone else the way it’s been handed to her. That’s what nine years in a sculptor’s studio taught me: hope is a discipline. You build it the same way you build a monument — patiently, stubbornly, one choice at a time, until it can hold the weight of everything that comes after you. HEROIC is my record of what it took to build something permanent, beautiful, and worthy of being handed to the next generation.”
— Traci L. Slatton, Director & Filmmaker, HEROIC
EVENT RECAP
What: HEROIC — Special Preview Screening & Live Q&A
When: Wednesday, June 24, 2026 | 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM BST
Where: ARC Conference 2026, Olympia London, UK
Q&A: Hosted by Charles Mostow, Sculptor & Assistant Director, in conversation with Traci L. Slatton, Director, Filmmaker & International Bestselling Author
ABOUT THE FILM
HEROIC follows Master Sculptor Sabin Howard’s nine-year creation of A Soldier’s Journey, the 58.5-foot bronze relief that became the sculptural heart of America’s National WWI Memorial, unveiled in Washington, D.C. on September 14, 2024. Shot over 4,000 hours across three continents by filmmaker and producer Traci L. Slatton, the film traces Howard’s journey from his South Bronx studio to a foundry in Stroud, England — a story of artistic obsession, bureaucratic resistance, and the refusal to let beauty lose. For more visit: https://superhumanfilm.productions/ Follow SuperHuman Film Productions @superhumanprod and learn more about director Traci L. Howard: https://tracilslatton.com/
ABOUT THE ARC CONFERENCE
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) is an international community of over 4,000 leaders from politics, business, technology, academia, law, culture, and the arts. ARC 2026, themed The Age of Reconstruction, convened in Olympia London, June 23–25, 2026, around a single question: how can Western civilization be rebuilt and renewed? HEROIC screened on the conference’s second evening, as discussion turned from diagnosis to demonstration. More at https://www.arc-conference.com/
Michelle Czernin von Chudenitz
EPEC Media Group, Inc.
Michelle@EPECmedia.com
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HEROIC Official Trailer: Sabin Howard Sculpts the National WWI Memorial in Traci L. Slatton’s Documentary on Art, Beauty and Remembrance
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