Wilfred La Salle put in 18 years with the City of New York, first as an NYPD school safety agent and then as a correction officer. He was getting close to a pension when he walked away to make movies, with no crew, no investors and no idea how to use the camera he had just bought. Seven years and seven feature films later, his newest, The Veteran, debuted on FOX Soul this Memorial Day, with its war scenes shot on the old military grounds at Floyd Bennett Field, Fort Tilden and Fort Totten and a real Army veteran playing the lead.

The Veteran follows Jose Torres, a U.S. Marine played by Yanko Valentin-Perez, who comes home from deployment to his wife and young son and loses both in a car accident weeks later. He turns to opioids, is administratively separated from service when the military finds out, and ends up homeless on the streets of New York, until he crosses paths with Maxwell Cade, a CEO played by Lancelot E. Theobald Jr. who sees past the wreckage and believes in him. La Salle’s press release lists earlier releases across Amazon Prime, Tubi, Apple TV and Roku, and on Wednesday he told Bushwick Daily the network deal is real and doubled: “The Veteran and The Security Guard are the films that are on FOX Soul, and we signed two deals with them.” The trailer is on YouTube, and the film has drawn reviews from Film Threat and The Movie Buff.

He was born and raised in the Bronx, and he does not dress up where he came from. “I was 18 years in with the City of New York,” he wrote to Bushwick Daily on Wednesday. “I worked as an NYPD School Safety Agent and as a New York City Correctional Officer before leaving to pursue filmmaking. I was getting close to retirement, but I made the decision to walk away because I knew I had a bigger mission. My wife was a little against it at first, but she understood that my mission was bigger.”