We'll show him the planes when they're working

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's top 50 films of 2024

#43 :  Hollywoodgate

Fascinating insight into the Taliban’s insular world by documentary-maker Ibrahim Nash’at, revealing the fighters’ lack of purpose after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

I'm skipping over A Sudden Glimpse To Deeper Things (#44) but only because I can't find it - I actually wanted to watch it because it's "lovingly eccentric" and "idiosyncratically persuasive" and the last film I watched about a forgotten painter was surprisingly enjoyable, but it wasn't to be (yet, at least). So instead we come to this which promises to be slightly less lovingly eccentric, following the life of some Taliban soldiers for a year. 

Well, a lot of it is, to Western eyes, very eccentric - but there's not a lot of love on display. The first thing to say about this is that it's an incredibly brave piece of film-making - I suspect Ibrahim was only allowed to show a very small amount of what he saw, but there's still quite a lot of "Can he show <X>? No, definitely not!" - and then he goes and shows it anyway. 

But, I do have to argue with The Guardian's use of "fascinating" - the most interesting thing about this film is how little of interest is shown. The film follows the commander of the Taliban air force (who struts around doing remarkably little) and one of his soldiers (who trains to be a pilot, but it's not actually clear what that involves either) - nothing really happens and it happens very slowly. 

The overall vibe is that the Taliban seem quite surprised that they won the battle for the country and are very uncertain as to what they should do next. They spend an awful lot of time wandering around looking at all the stuff the Americans left behind (the film says they left over $7 billion of military hardware behind) - they even manage to get some of it working by the end of film for a military parade (which features some very silly marching!). They're also at time scarily incompetent - "can you multiply 67 by 100? yes, it's 210,000".

And yet, as the film shows, the country somehow struggles on - a bigger picture would have been more interesting, but I can understand that probably just wouldn't have been possible. The film does manage to get some digs in about women's rights - amusingly, if the Taliban had editorial control they probably viewed everything that was said as perfectly reasonable.

I think this counts as a worthy offering rather than a particularly interesting one - the situation is incredible, but following a couple of guys around turns out not to be the best way to investigate it. If you fancy it, it's on iPlayer but it didn't quite click for me. 

#45 - Impressive and entertaining
#41 - Essential, but also "what's the point?"