Black Nights 2016 Review: THE LAND OF THE ENLIGHTENED Enchants With Its Docu-drama Blend

If there's one thing everybody needs to know about, it's Tallin Black Nights (or PÖFF as it is rather fantastically named in Estonian). Having gained A-list status back in 2014, it's now officially one of the top fifteen film festivals in the world; except I reckon it's probably much higher on the coolness scale. Opening it's eclectic 20th edition tonight, there's already been a black-tie showing of Tran Anh Hung's visually lavish Eternity, outings for Steven Cantor's fantastic Dancer in neighbouring Tartu, and more mainstream offerings like A Monster Calls.

Always passionate but not pretentious, PÖFF has achieved it's meteoric rise by adopting a different philosophy to it's bigger brothers and sisters. Coming near the end of the festival calendar, PÖFF concentrates on just scooping up all the best new titles from the year and putting them in one place. And that's exactly what they've done with films like Jan de Pue's exceptional docu-drama The Land of the Enlightened, which premiered at Sundance, and went on to IFFR back in January.

Backed by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund, the Netherlands Film Fund and the Irish Film Board, The Land of the Enlightened is part of a glut of great films which this trio launched earlier this year, and it bares all the hallmarks of the visually striking, cutting-edge projects they tend to back. After all, films that burn a fictional texture into documentaries are very current at the moment (with Joshua Oppenheimer's films probably being the most well-known example of this). So whilst Pieter-Jan de Pue's film may not be The Act of Killing, it does go further into the realm of the "docu-drama," and there are few filmmakers who do it quite so well.

What we get is a scathing document about the War on Terror in Afghanistan, except it is always stiched into a familiar tale about a boy who wants to marry a beautiful girl. In this instance, however, the film's lead is literally a boy, and the band of oportunistic ruffians who follow him are all a similarly adolescent age. What results is quite an interesting comment on the state the country after many centuries of invasion.

All adults before their time, these young "lions" (as they call themselves) fiercely patrol an area surrounding an old Soviet sentry post. Armed with AK-47s, they split their time between shaking down local opium smugglers and herding goats - and viewers should note, animals were definitely harmed during the making of this movie. But the boys' vagabond attempt to source enough opium to ensure their leader's wedding goes ahead does really proves to be quite fascinating.

What we see in The Land of the Enlightened is always superimposed onto classical folklores about how Afghanistan was gifted to its people by God, or how the Mongols took it from its rightful owners. As a consequence, the ongoing actions of the American and Afghan forces in the film take on a fascinatingly timeless quality. We are almost forced to always see the present and 3,000 years' of past at the same time.

The sensations this mashup creates is deliciously oxymoronic, and is rather brilliantly exacerbated by a colliding things like Pink Floyd with classical Afghan songs. There's a really charming, edgy quality to the kids' performances too, something which becomes almost amusing in an absurdist way, given the nature of the things we see them do.

De Pue also intensely satirizes the War on Terror, and at times this is laugh-out-loud funny. At others, though, it does genuinely comes to seem as if the troops in this film are reinacting something from Call of Duty grudge match. Despite it's humour, though, The Land of the Enlightened is first and foremost a visually experimental piece.

It stunningly captures Afghanistan's beauty and variety, and the horrors that litter its lanscapes in an endless stream of spent ammunition and unexploded anti-tank mines. But above all, this film uses its techniques to lend Afghanistan's situation a certain mythic grandeur. It tslow-mos things like bright prayer scrolls blowing across vast open plains like divinely portentuous tumbleweed, or dissolves footage of brutally modern helicopters into shots of timeless landscapes.

Similarly, it parallels the boys' present with the past Soviet invasion of the country by switching between crisp digital footage and an older '80s-looking style. It is as though this film telescopes time and makes the boys' conflict ultimately seem totemic and endless. Put simply, if this kind of audio-visual cunningness is the future of docu-dramas, I want more of it.