A scene early in Ibrahim Nash’at’s chilling new documentary “Hollywoodgate” makes clear the stakes of Nash’at’s undertaking. Invited by the Taliban to film a top leader, the new air force commander Malawi Mansour, and a lower-ranking Taliban Mukhtar, after the departure of American Troops from Afghanistan in 2021, Mansour makes clear his feelings about the documentary and Nash’at. Speaking with an underling, he notes, “if his intentions are bad, he will die soon.” It’s a scene that, like the rest of the film, is viewed at a distance, a prerequisite for Nash’at’s undertaking.
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The Taliban believe (or at least hope) that Nash’at will film propaganda for them, severely restricting his access to film the poverty of the Afghani people. Instead, “Hollywoodgate” weaponizes these restrictions, almost never turning its camera away from Mansour as he attempts to revive an air force with the gear and weapons that the Americans left behind. It’s quite literally a singular portrait of a military leader, and it’s all the more unnerving for how acutely it zooms into Mansour and Mukhtar’s extremism.
Named after the largest CIA base in Kabul, the film begins with the Taliban roaming through the abandoned property, opening discarded boxes and refrigerators to realize that America left behind troves of medicine, gear, and a liberal amount of alcohol. As they walk through the offices, Mansour spouts rhetoric that suggests the Taliban will soon transition from an insurgent militia to a full-blown military regime.
One gets the sense that Nash’at doesn’t fully believe him at first, as he struggles to keep soldiers in line and even do basic math to create a budget to pay the soldiers in the Air Force — a darkly comedic scene sees him ask multiple officers to multiply 67 by 100, yielding radically different answers. While a frightening presence, Mansour also seems inept, more concerned with presenting himself as a leader to Nash’at than actually leading. If they can barely figure out how to feed and pay their soldiers, it stands to reason that no one should be worried about the dismantled helicopters that the US military left behind on the airfield.
Yet, by the end of the film, it’s quite clear that Mansour and the Taliban should not be underestimated, as the newly restored helicopters fly over a military parade with representatives from Russia, China, Iran, among others watching on. This scene, along with a postscript that notes the US left behind roughly $7 billion in military hardware, is terrifying in its implications.
If the film’s portrait of Mansour is scary, Nash’at never gives as much attention to Mukhtar. A soldier in Mansour’s unit, the film only spends a short amount of time with him. Perhaps Nash’at became more interested in Mansour, or Mukhtar’s fundamentalism didn’t lend itself to as much drama, but the overall design of the film feels slightly skewed.
The same goes for an initial voice-over where Nash’at lays out the parameters of his agreement with the Taliban but often doesn’t turn the camera back on himself. That Mansour essentially takes over the film isn’t surprising considering what he’s able to accomplish in a year, but one feels that there is another film about Nash’at’s death-defying process somewhere on the editing floor.
“Hollywoodgate” trades these more nuanced characterizations for blunt force storytelling, but its nevertheless incredibly effective. The same goes for Volker Bertelmann’s score which is used sparingly but, like his Oscar-winning work in “All Quiet on the Western Front,” when it’s foregrounded, is booming and menacing. Nash’at may have started the filmmaking process looking for something resembling humanity in the Taliban fighters, but what he found instead was a shocking level of resolve that we, and the US military, underestimated. [A-]
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