When U.S. military forces quit Afghanistan in August 2021, they didn’t take everything with them, as filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at would discover.
As the Taliban took possession of a reputed CIA base abandoned by the U.S., Nash’at’s camera rolled, capturing heaps of medicines, foodstuffs, batteries and weaponry stored in a warehouse-like building behind a gate marked “Hollywood.”
“I expected them to just find a couple of shampoos and some broken rifles,” Nash’at commented after a screening of his documentary Hollywoodgate as part of Deadline’s For the Love of Docs virtual event series. “My thought [was] the maximum they’re going to find is, ‘How do we use this shampoo?’ … [But] it was a real wonderland.”
The Taliban soon got the weapons back in working order. But the real prize lay elsewhere on the base — several billion dollars’ worth of sophisticated aircraft, intentionally damaged by departing U.S. personnel. But not rendered completely obsolete.
“[The Taliban] started to fix rifles and then they started to say, ‘Ah, but here there are spare parts for the airplane. These aircraft could be fixed.’ And then the story started to evolve,” Nash’at said. “I never expected them to find all of the weapons they have found or even to think about fixing these weapons. And I didn’t believe myself that they could fix these weapons.”
Shortly after U.S. troops left the country, ending a 20-year occupation, Nash’at approached the Taliban about filming. They knew the Egyptian-born Nash’at had interviewed prominent world figures before, and apparently saw his presence as providing them legitimacy.
“At that time, Taliban were somehow trying to seek approval through journalism,” he observed. “Back then, they were saying, ‘We are Taliban 2.0 and we are going to let women be free’ and all of that. And that’s when I got the initial access.”
His camera honed in on Mawlawi Mansour, soon to be the new head of Afghanistan’s Air Force, a Taliban whose father had been killed years before in an American airstrike.
“When I met him at the beginning, he was not yet appointed as the head of the Air Force … I was the first journalist to meet him. So, he was somehow excited, I would say, to have some foreigner running after him with a camera,” Nash’at explained. “There was some sort of sense of validation that he was seeking at that time, and that’s why I guess he approved me in the beginning.”
Over the course of the year that Nash’at filmed in Afghanistan, he began to see a change in Commander Mansour.
“You could see really through his journey how he transforms from being someone that believes he is the change … at least in his head, he thinks he’s the one that is bringing the change in the country, [to] quickly falling into the trap of power … until it comes to this moment when he has to slap the people in their faces,” Nash’at recalled. “And the moment he slaps them, it feels like it’s the turning point of him accepting being, again, another power that suppresses people rather than trying to find a solution.”
That arc to Commander Mansour proved a parallel to the Taliban writ large. Nash’at shows how the increasingly self-confident regime began to be courted by Russia, Iran, China and other countries, and how the newly empowered Taliban became more belligerent toward its neighbors – threatening to invade Tajikistan with air power inherited from the U.S. The director also captured the relationship between Mansour and his young son, a boy of perhaps 9 who is shown being inculcated in the ways of the warrior.
“The only thing I was telling myself at that time is that I’m very, very lucky to have been born away from such a conflict, which could have decided my childhood from a very young age,” he said. “Because every input that is happening around this kid is just forcing him into that [role of warrior]. And I hope that the country of Afghanistan does not see another war soon so they can recover a little bit from the wars and younger generations could find different ways rather than just having to follow the ideology of the Taliban.”
Just when it appeared Commander Mansour might be getting an inkling that Nash’at wasn’t the fellow traveler he perhaps thought he was, the director and his translator got out of Afghanistan with his footage. Hollywoodgate has won prizes at film festivals around the world including Zurich, Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Poland, Full Frame in North Carolina, and the El Gouna Film Festival in Nash’at’s native Egypt, and has emerged as a strong Oscar contender this year.
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
For the Love of Docs is a virtual Deadline event series presented by National Geographic. It continues with a new film screening each Tuesday through December 2. Next up: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the award-winning doc directed by Johan Grimonprez.