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“When the Taliban came to power (once again), I was shocked. What would have happened to the Afghan people?»: Ibrahim Nash’at, Egyptian director born in 1990, started from this question to make his documentary “Hollywoodgate”, presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival.
The film’s title refers to a purported former CIA base in Kabul, which the Taliban immediately occupied the day after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. that the world‘s most technologically advanced military has left behind: planes, weapons and valuable military equipment. Amazed by the technology, Malawi Mansour, the new Air Force commander, orders his soldiers to inventory and repair everything they can.
Mukhtar
The ambitious Mukhtar also arrives at the same place, intending to pursue a high-ranking military career. The first question that arises in front of this product is how Nash’at managed to shoot this film during the (re)birth of the Taliban regime: the answer is that the latter granted access to international documentary filmmakers for propaganda purposes, on condition that they only shoot what the authorities wanted. Despite these restrictions, what the director managed to film is so impressive and shocking to make this film a precious and disturbing document at the same time.
The formation of a military regime
This work can be defined as a sort of training film, which follows the transformation of a fundamentalist militia into a military regime. In about a year, the director’s eye shows this terrifying journey, managing to forcefully make us reflect on what happened just a couple of years ago in that part of the world. A co-production between Germany and the United States, “Hollywoodgate” is a sort of journalistic reporting in which the formal apparatus counts up to a certain point. If the aesthetics don’t have great originality, what is really important in a job like this is the contents and the sense of terrifying amazement it arouses in the public.
It should be noted that this will certainly not be the last interesting documentary scheduled in Venice: among the most significant titles of this type on paper of the event we will see in the coming days “Menus plaisirs – les troisgros” by Frederick Wiseman and “Ryuchi Sakamoto – Opus ” by Neo Sora, but also “Amor” by Virginia Eleuteri Serpieri (co-production between Italy and Lithuania) and “Dario Argento Panico” by Simone Scafidi.