A scene early in Ibrahim Nash’at’s chilling new documentary “Hollywoodgate” makes clear the stakes of Nash’at’s undertaking. Invited by the Taliban to film a top leader, the new air force commander Malawi Mansour, and a lower-ranking Taliban Mukhtar, after the departure of American Troops from Afghanistan in 2021, Mansour makes clear his feelings about the documentary and Nash’at. Speaking with an underling, he notes, “if his intentions are bad, he will die soon.” It’s a scene that, like the rest of the film, is viewed at a distance, a prerequisite for Nash’at’s undertaking.
Continue reading ‘Hollywoodgate’ Review: Ibrahim Nash’at’s Terrifying Film Documents The Taliban’s Takeover Of Afghanistan [Venice] at The Playlist.
Continue reading ‘Hollywoodgate’ Review: Ibrahim Nash’at’s Terrifying Film Documents The Taliban’s Takeover Of Afghanistan [Venice] at The Playlist.
- 9/2/2023
- by Christian Gallichio
- The Playlist
If you witnessed the chaos unfold in Kabul airport two years ago, it probably won’t come as much of a surprised to learn the US Army left a helicopter or two in Afghanistan. More alarming might be the news, calmly delivered at the start of this profoundly unreassuring documentary, that the cache of weapons and equipment that remains is estimated to be worth somewhere in the region of $7,000,000,000. In Hollywoodgate, an out-of-competition premiere at the Venice Film Festival this week, the Egyptian journalist and filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at risks life and limb to achieve the improbable: nestling his way in with the Taliban fighters in charge of an abandoned U.S. base and observing their attempts to utilize what the Army left behind. “The Americans left us an enormous treasure,” one General observes; Nash’at’s film offers a worrying insight into what they might decide to do with it all.
- 9/1/2023
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
When the last American transport plane left the tarmac at Kabul’s international airport in August 2021, ending a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and marking an unceremonious conclusion to what had been known as the “forever war,” the U.S. left more than unfulfilled promises and unanswered questions in its wake: Also left behind was more than $7 billion in military equipment, now in the hands of an Islamist government that rose to power not at the ballot box, but at the barrel of a gun.
What would become of all that sophisticated weaponry is a question that hung over the heads of the war-weary Afghan people, who after two decades of American occupation and brutal Taliban insurgency saw their dwindling hopes of democracy fade to black. It is a question, too, that hangs over “Hollywoodgate,” an arresting, verité portrait of the Taliban’s transition from a fundamentalist militia to a military...
What would become of all that sophisticated weaponry is a question that hung over the heads of the war-weary Afghan people, who after two decades of American occupation and brutal Taliban insurgency saw their dwindling hopes of democracy fade to black. It is a question, too, that hangs over “Hollywoodgate,” an arresting, verité portrait of the Taliban’s transition from a fundamentalist militia to a military...
- 8/31/2023
- by Christopher Vourlias
- Variety Film + TV
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