![Hollywoodgate](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Hollywoodgate-Still-2-H-2023.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1)
One of 2022’s most acclaimed documentaries was Matthew Heineman’s Retrograde, an eye-opening and epically tragic look at the final months of American presence in Afghanistan. It’s a disheartening film and one, like most of Heineman’s docs, characterized by the type of access that makes you wonder, “Why did these people allow this filmmaker to be there at this pivotal, rarely flattering moment?”
In chronology, Ibrahim Nash’at’s Hollywoodgate is almost a sequel to Retrograde, tracing the first year of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal. In theme, it’s a complementary text to many impossibly and improbably sourced documentaries set against forbidden and foreboding backdrops. It’s an interrogation of “access” and what happens when conflicting initiatives of propaganda and journalism intersect. As its title perhaps implies, it’s most fascinating in meta terms, as a film about the power and limitations of documentary filmmaking — and in those terms it’s fascinating enough that I was only occasionally bothered by how unrealized it is as a project that’s actually about its expressed subject.
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Hollywoodland
Director: Ibrahim Nash'at
1 hour 32 minutes
Nash’at, an Egyptian journalist, explains in introductory text that he arrived in Kabul just days after the American withdrawal with only a camera and an Afghan translator. Through some series of negotiations, he was able to get formal access to two Taliban officials working out of the Hollywood Gate complex, claimed to be an evacuated CIA base.
“In return, I must show the world the image of the Taliban that they want me to see,” Nash’at explains candidly. Of course, that’s not what he wants, and he adds, “Between the gates of what they wanted and what I came to do, may I show what I saw.”
The presumption, then, is that the camera inherently captures truth, especially in instances where that camera is going behind doors with clearly marked “No Cameras” signs.
The documentary covers the year Nash’at spent with those two men: Malawi Mansour, a newly assigned and clearly unqualified Air Force commander, and M.J. Mukhtar, a young lieutenant with clear resentments and psychological scars from this most recent 20-year war in his homeland. Its third star is the Hollywood Gate complex itself, an astonishing trove of abandoned aircraft, weapons, technology and even gym equipment left behind by American forces in their hasty departure.
As we begin, nobody in the Taliban crew necessarily knows how to use any of this stuff. But repairs and training are underway as they want to push Nash’at’s film toward documenting a 12-month transition from “insurgent militia to a military regime,” and as Nash’at attempts to mine background details, context, clues and spontaneous reactions to document the truth.
Hollywoodgate is about that push and pull more than it’s about the Taliban.
The director’s major tactic is exposing the artifice whenever possible, leaving in the conversations where soldiers discuss him, as well as scenes in which he and his camera appear in reflections. At the same time, they all know and see exactly what he’s doing, derisively commenting, for example, when his camera wanders to women on the TV news with their mandated face-coverings. The Talibs chide, insult and, in one instance, manhandle Nash’at’s camera.
My instinct is that Hollywoodgate is probably closer to the documentary his Taliban hosts wanted than the documentary Nash’at and editors Atanas Georgiev and Marion Tuor hoped they would be able to pull from the footage. That doesn’t mean Hollywoodgate shouldn’t have been made, and it doesn’t mean that Nash’at failed, though in some cases he clearly did.
It comes down to this question: What is the cost to the Taliban of what is depicted here? The answer? Nothing. Nash’at’s subjects aren’t self-conscious about their religion-fueled misogyny or antisemitism, nor about their hatred for the Americans. And why would they be? It’s their brand. And sure, Hollywoodgate occasionally spots behaviors and interactions that might make its “heroes” look like bumpkins or Keystone cops unprepared for this moment of supremacy. But even in those sequences, who looks worse, the blundering imperialist power that was forced to ditch billions in equipment as part of an ignominious exit or the new junta that took a few months to learn how to use that equipment?
So maybe the result is that instead of being overtly tragic or horrifying, Hollywoodland is just disconcerting. Neither of Nash’at’s primary subjects comes across as particularly malevolent, nor the least bit righteous; that’s partially a function of balance and partially a result of Nash’at using Mansour and Mukhtar as swipe-cards into spaces a journalist would never otherwise be allowed.
Whatever ideological message the Taliban hoped would be conveyed gets lost in Nash’at’s observational approach, which treats this base as almost a setting for a post-apocalyptic thriller. Survivors make sense of the debris left from a previous civilization, like a 2023 version of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” — “Look on my discarded treadmills, ye mighty, and despair.” That resonates more than the few quick scenes of Afghan civilians and children that Nash’at’s handlers accidentally let him get access to.
Maybe Nash’at hoped to get something more decisive, more instantly cautionary, but I suspect Hollywoodland will gain potency in the years to come. The Taliban wanted a 90-minute commercial and Nash’at wanted 90 minutes of truth, and what they both got was a portrait of the complicated cost of access — more vital in its universal applicability to documentary filmmaking than its immediacy as a documentary.
Full credits
Production Companies: Rolling Narratives, Jouzour Film Production, Cottage M, RaeFilm Studios
Director: Ibrahim Nash’at
Writers: Ibrahim Nash’at, Talal Derki, Shane Boris
Editors: Atanas Georgiev, Marion Tuor
Director of Photography: Ibrahim Nash’at
Composer: Volker Bertelmann
1 hour 32 minutes
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