In August 2021 the United States withdrew the last of its troops from Afghanistan, ending its military presence there after two decades. The exit was as hasty as the invasion was protracted. The Taliban swiftly and officially regained control of the country, two weeks after marching into Kabul, the capital, with little or no resistance.
Ibrahim Nash’at, a Berlin-based Egyptian journalist who has worked for Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle and Voice of America, watched the Americans abandon their embassy and wondered what would happen next.
The immediate answer was a refugee crisis, as many Afghans fled the country. Larger questions of governance and life under the Taliban brought Nash’at to the Islamic emirate to conduct a covert investigation in plain sight. The extraordinary project almost didn’t happen.
“When I got there I was in contact with a fixer or a middleman that was going to tell me to reach the Taliban,” Nash’at says. “He also had access to a translator from within the group that could accompany me. But when I arrived in the country the middleman disappeared. I tried to call him many times. He never answered. I was left with this translator, and we tried to reach out to the people to make this, the initial story I tried to make. It didn’t work out. I told the translator, ‘I’m running out of money and leaving the country.’ He felt sad for me and said, ‘How about you come with me and make a small story?’”
That small story was a trip to Hollywoodgate, a glamorously named abandoned US base, replete with an estimated $7 billion worth of American military aircraft, munitions and other supplies, including medicines (and Jägermeister). A silo of discarded vehicles and equipment was restorable with care and time.
“When I saw Hollywoodgate I knew that this is the story that I was meant to tell, this is the movie I was meant to make,” Nash’at says. “So I decided I would do whatever it takes to stay within this space. And then I was introduced to Mukhtar.”
Mukhtar, an ambitious Taliban lieutenant, allowed Nash’at to follow and film him, but only with permission from his superior Malawi Mansour, who turned out to be the head of Afghanistan’s nascent Taliban-controlled air force. Mansour marshals his troops to create an inventory and repair whatever they can from the “treasure trove” while Nash’at shoots footage.
This remarkable access — the journalist shot for a year — was tempered by a series of demands. Nash’at was forbidden from filming outside the complex; nor could he interview Afghan citizens. The Taliban commander, meanwhile, expressed a simple, chilling rule for the documentarian: “If his intentions are bad, he will die soon.”
“I had to go through a lot of leadership,” Nash’at says. “It’s crazy how many leaders you have to go through in the Taliban. And at the top of this list was Malawi Mansour. In the moment I said, ‘Can I film with you too?’ And he said yes directly, but the problem was not with the initial negotiations. Back then the Taliban was acting like they were open to the media. They were saying, ‘We’re Taliban 2.0. We’re going to let women be free.’ In the beginning, I had access. But keeping that access started to become much harder and stressful. For me, access is my rock. I kept pushing. And every time things were about to open up, they closed again. And I had to restart the process from the beginning. Somehow, we pulled it together.”
Odessa Rae, the Oscar- and Bafta-winning producer behind the documentary Navalny, is accustomed to finding herself in geopolitical hot spots. In The Story Won’t Die (2021), she and the film-maker David Henry Gerson chronicled the Syrian artists displaced by civil war; last year’s Defiant profiled Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba.
Nash’at’s dangerous journey into Taliban-ruled Afghanistan for Hollywoodgate would prove Rae’s most nerve-racking venture to date.
“It was worrisome,” the Canadian producer says. “I’ve dealt with this quite a bit on different films. We had many sleepless nights. We didn’t only have Ibrahim. We had to evacuate our translator, Adel Safi, from Afghanistan. Thankfully, I had my connections through Navalny. We did a screening at the European Union, and that gave me access to the vice-president of the European Union. I made a personal request to her at a dinner, saying, ‘I’m working on another really important film, but we won’t be able to make it unless we get out one individual who worked on the film with us’. At the time, all European governments had paused taking in Afghan refugees. It was still very difficult. We had to find passage for our translator to Pakistan and then have him wait there.”
For Nash’at, Adel Safi’s safe passage was payment in kind. The translator, he says, saved his life on countless occasions. The documentarian wisely asked that Safi not translate any hateful things he might hear. Audiences watching the film know when a Taliban soldier says, “That little devil is filming again.” Nash’at didn’t know until the editing suite.
“I know that The Taliban never trusted me,” Nash’at says. “I was protected somehow by not speaking the language, because there was an interpreter in the middle, and he was filtering what I say. He really saved me in so many situations that I would say something that was wrong. He would culturally translate this into something that they understand. And that doesn’t hurt me. That kept me safe for so long.”
The Taliban initially imagined that Hollywoodgate would serve as a glorious chronicle of their new regime. The final cut couldn’t be further from that aspiration. Early on, a young soldier wishes for the Americans to return so that he might be martyred in a hail of “500 bullets”. A secret-service agent boasts about torture procedures off camera.
The film-making team were careful to avoid any images that might endanger their subjects.
Since taking power in 2021, the Taliban — despite promises of more moderate religious rule — have barred women from most areas of public life, severely restricted what women can do unaccompanied and stopped girls from being educated beyond primary school. As such, Mansour boasts about his wife’s abilities as a doctor — a profession she has been forced to give up after marriage — and tells a joke that compares a woman without a veil to a chocolate that has fallen on the floor.
Nash’at was mentored by Talal Derki, director of the similarly themed, Oscar-nominated 2017 film Of Fathers and Sons. Derki, who serves as a producer on Hollywoodgate, embedded himself with a jihadist family in northern Syria.
“When I was feeling a bit closer to someone, I use the technique that was taught to me by my therapist,” the film-maker says. “I just could ask ideological questions at these moments, and when you ask ideological questions the answers are shocking. That would make space again, at least for me. I’m back to being the weird guy sitting silent in a room with the camera. Like a soldier put at the door with the weapon and they just stand there for the whole day.”
Nash’at realised that the jig was up when, after filming a parade staged for dignitaries visiting from Iran, Russia and China, he was asked to share his footage. He hurriedly boarded the next plane from Kabul airport, uncertain if he had the film he wanted to make in the can.
“I was haunted by the material I captured for so long. I was worried that we would not be able to deliver the suffering of the Afghans to the audience. The fact that I filmed only with the Taliban, that was hurting me. But the power of editing really helps you find ways of telling the story you want to tell, even with the limited footage that we had. Cinema is a tool that will put two images beside each other in a way that tells way more than what you actually see. I hope that we were successful in doing that.”
For Rae, too, the film is all about those who don’t appear on screen. “It was a dangerous film to make. But, like Ibrahim says, it’s nothing compared to the pain and suffering of the Afghan people.”
Hollywoodgate opens in cinemas on Friday, August 16th
