Director – Ibrahim Nash’at – 2023 – US, Germany – Cert. 12a – 89m
****
A Western documentary shot with the approval of the Taliban showing the eponymous air base in which the Americans abandoned large stocks of military hardware – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 16th
An extraordinary exercise in both journalism and historical, socio-political filmmaking. A few days after the US military pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, fearless, former journalist Nash’at entered the country as, to all intents and purposes, a one-man film crew. At first, it was a fruitless exercise, but then he somehow managed to get in with a soldier about to be deployed on a big airport.
Negotiating with Afghanistan’s airforce to be allowed to shoot documentary footage, Nash’at secured himself permission to follow and shoot not just the lieutenant, M.J. Mukhtar, but also the new head of the airforce, Mawlawi Mansour, with the proviso that anything Nash’at was told not to film, he was not to film and anytime he was ordered to stop filming, he had to stop filming. Refusal to do either would have meant big trouble. He played along, shooting whatever he could without breaking the air force head’s trust, knowing that the Taliban would have no control whatsoever over the footage when he left the country to edit what he’d shot.
He got luckier still when he accompanied his two subjects to the airport at which they were to be deployed and saw the sign for Hollywoodgate. Quite apart from it bearing the enigmatic title that it did, this was the air base where the US had abandoned a good deal of military hardware, damaging and sabotaging it to prevent its use by the Talban.
Judging by their filmed presence here, however, the Afghans are a clever and adaptable lot whose culture, so alien to the West, enables them to work in very different ways. We watch conversations between technicians and air force leaders, where the former tell the later they can get scuppered aircraft working perfectly again. It’s easy enough to be sceptical about their abilities, but one of the last things Nash’at filmed was a big military parade held at Hollywoodgate where, along with the (Russian-style) marching soldiers and tanks, were repaired Black Hawk aircraft flying past.
Hardly any women appear in the final edit (there was a lot of shot footage, but it was felt by the filmmaking team that to include much of it might endanger the women concerned). An early sequence shows women being brutally beaten in the street by men with whips. More powerful, however, is the sequence where the commander looks at the ledger books on the air base and is openly astonished at all the women on the payroll, something he wanted rectified immediately. He jokes to others about his own wife, a trained doctor, who he ordered to give up her profession if she married him.
As we follow the commander and the minion soldier around, every so often, there come instructions not to film a specific thing, or to shut the camera down now. In both instances, particularly the latter, you wonder what might have been on the screen but has instead been concealed by this prohibition.
Although the act of documentary filmmaking comprises, in essence, the act of pointing a camera and a microphone at the subject, there’s a feeling watching Hollywoodgate that the footage (although not its editing) is only what the Taliban themselves think is acceptable for outsiders to see. Nevertheless, by the time it has been through an editing process outside their control, we are watching a film not just of what we can see and hear in front of and around us, but also of what we can’t see, things we deduce and imagine from the footage unspooling before our eyes. Which, when you think abut it, is something of a remarkable achievement.
Nash’at’s taking his camera into Afghanistan is an extremely brave course of action, and deserves recognition from the worlds of journalism, media and film making for doing so. And attention from audiences, because if you don’t see the film for yourself, what was the point of Nash’at risking his own safety to record this material and put it into a comprehensible form? So, having said that, go and see it. It would be worth doing a little background reading beforehand – here, for instance, if you can, as, that way, you’ll get far more out of the detail in the film. Seeing a screening where the filmmakers give a Q&A (as I was lucky enough to do) would also be illuminating.
Hollywoodgate is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, August 16th.
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