In August 2021, the United States ended its disastrous 20-year occupation of Afghanistan with a suitably slapdash withdrawal. The Taliban, which had been expelled from power in 2001, retook control. Billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment and vehicles were left behind, much of it disabled but restorable, given enough time. Not long after the last US forces left, filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at entered the country. In an impressive coup of access, he managed to become embedded with Taliban forces, spending a year watching them transition from insurgency back to governance. The result is the documentary Hollywoodgate (2023).
The film mostly withholds overt explanation, with the exception of opening and closing montages that include supertitles and narration by Nash’at. Most of the action takes place within a recently abandoned US military complex in Kabul. Mawlawi Mansour, the new head of the Afghan Air Force, is the central figure, directing soldiers in cataloging everything the Americans abandoned — ranging from helicopters to medicine to gym equipment — as part of the effort to build something after so many years of war and destruction.
Despite his permission to film them, the Talibs view Nash’at with suspicion verging on contempt, envenoming the documentary with wariness. Multiple times, they openly discuss killing him if he films something they don’t want him to — not as a threat, but in a completely matter-of-fact way, just one logistical detail among many. Needless to say, Nash’at’s access to them is extremely constricted. He is not allowed anywhere without an escort, and can only attain footage of ordinary Afghans via views from cars as he travels.
Nash’at was mentored by director Talal Derki, who is a producer here. Derki’s Oscar-nominated 2017 film Of Fathers and Sons had a similar conceit: He embedded himself within a family with a jihadist patriarch living in an area of Northern Syria controlled by the Salafist Al-Nusra Front. These are fraught projects — the filmmakers’ desire to honestly depict everyday life in these conditions grates against their subjects’ desire to be uplifted. This documentary’s name comes from “Hollywood Gate I,” a now-unguarded checkpoint the film’s subjects drive through, but it also alludes to the power that these fighters-turned-rulers recognize in cinema.
That idea of narrativizing one’s own life is also expressed outright by Mansour, whose civilian father was killed by a bomb dropped by an American airplane, and who now sees a divine poetry in commanding planes that can drop bombs. Moments like these are the most illuminative of the Taliban mindset, wherein the idea of one’s life being a story is wrapped up in both religious and nationalist fervor. Such moments are scattered among more surreal, sometimes comical episodes — a roomful of officials all unable to properly calculate 67 times 100 stands out. That mixture of horror and out-of-pocket oddness makes Hollywoodgate a uniquely uncanny film.
Hollywoodgate (2023) is playing at IFC Center (323 6th Avenue, West Village, Manhattan) through August 1.