Was it really terrifying being out on the frontlines with no weapons, just a movie camera?
No, I don't think "terrifying" is the right word. It was a very strange experience. I mean it can be very hard to describe to people who haven't been around conflict themselves. I think there's this kind of very basic fear, which arises when something explodes next to you or a bullet flies past. That's a very instinctive kind of fear which occurs. That only lasts for a split second, though, and then you realise that you're fine and that that fear is over.
I think what's much harder is when you have a long time to sit and think, you know? Like when you're stuck somewhere. Like when we were stuck in the compound in Jasha, for example, which you see in the middle of the film. We were stuck there for about four hours, and that gives you a lot of time to really think about how you got yourself into that situation.
The realisations that come then are a lot more disturbing to me than the kind of instinctive fear caused by something exploding next to me. It's more reaching this kind of long-term, very high level anxiety and awareness, and having to deal with it over a very long period of time.
What do you think has lead you to put yourself in these kinds of situations?
I think it's just a decision I made personally that it was worth that risk. For me, I would only risk my life to make a film that I thought was unique and that I thought would contribute to the landscape of cinema about war. But yeah, I've arrived at that decision through a lot of life experiences.
You know, I have a very long, personal experience of violence in my own life, so I'd say it's something that I know how to handle. I also understand how violence affects me, but I would never recommend that making this kind of film is something they should do, unless they've been through that same process.
Was this a process you personally experienced in the UK or in Palestine?
I've never lived in Palestine, I've only worked in Palestine; I mean, my family are all refugees, so I've never lived there. No, when I refer to the violence in my life, I'm talking about my home life. I just grew up in a very violent home.
It's definitely a terrible way for a kid to grow up. But the one advantage, if I had to name one, is that if you work in the kind of journalism I do, you're very used to conflict and violence. That means that when someone points a gun at your face and screams at you, you know how you're going to react. It's not an unknown experience, and it's very important in a situation like that to know that you can react in the right way.
I think in those situations, people fall into one of two categories. When they're under extreme pressure or extreme stress, some people experience everything that little bit faster. They think faster, they move faster - they panic, basically. Whilst the other group of people think slower. Those people think a little more clearly, they take a split second to contemplate what they're doing and they come up with a much more logical decision.
I would say I'm in the second category, and that's the kind of person I want to work with. I don't want be around the sort of person who panics if something goes wrong.
How were the people you filmed in Afghanistan responding to you and your project?
I think it took them quite a while to get used to the idea that we were making a very humanist documentary. We weren't really producing something that would be war propaganda, our film would be built around the details of their ordinary lives, and they're not really used to being filmed in that way. But once they understood that we were trying to make something very different from the sorts of documentaries you might see on Afghan television, in general they were very supportive. They were extremely welcoming and friendly to us, especially considering they hardly knew me at all.
What do you think it really means to these soldiers to be defending their country for themselves?
I think a lot of the soldiers have very different reasons for joining the army, and that's one of the things we wanted to show in the film. I think some of them joined out of desperation, they just really needed a job - and it's a pretty good job by Afghan standards. Whereas some of them have a sense of patriotic duty; you know, they actually do it because they want to defend their country. For others it's practical: they want to protect their families or they really hate the Taliban and they want to get rid of them. I think generally it's a mixture of all those things, but there is, I would say, a more rhetorical sense of nationalism that you don't get with the British or American army.
I think that's partly just because of the recent history that they've been. I mean, the national army for them is still quite a new concept. It's a fairly new thing, it didn't exist in that sort of form before the war in 2001. So you have to imagine that they don't have the decades of cynicism that Britain might have been able to build up around the idea of a national army.
Did they give you a sense that this was the first time somebody was really making an effort to talk to them like that, then?
I find this with a lot of my films, actually, just because my approach is usually very different from the sort of mainstream news or documentary approach. People usually tell me that I ask them questions they've never been asked before.
But yeah, it's also true that you do need to ask the obvious questions - and they'll sort of end up giving you the obvious answers - but after a few hours, I do think you arrive at a new level of conversation, and that's when it gets really interesting.
For sure, though, they're definitely used to being asked much more basic questions or much more superficial questions. Of course they also assume that as a journalist of filmmaker you want those sort of basic, superficial stock answers. So they would say something like, "I want to serve my country, because I love my army and it's my duty," and that's not a very revealing answer, meaning you need to reformulate that question in so many different ways over the course of a year before you get what you think is a real, or the genuine, answer. An answer which reveals something new about the war.
What do you make of the way the war in Afghanistan has been depicted in the West generally?
I think in general it's been terrible. The coverage has been very lazy, superficial, also racist and colonialist. But sorry to say that that's the real tradition of British television journalism. I mean there are so many documentaries made within the British TV industry that are all of those things. They don't allow people to speak for themselves. They need the intelligent white man in front of the camera to tell you what the Afghan believes. They need the voice over of the intelligent white man to tell you what life is like in Afghanistan. They don't trust the subject of their films to speak for themselves.
Sometimes that's overt, and it can be really patronising and insulting. Particularly to people that this country went to war with. We need to understand that this is not a neutral situation that British filmmakers are entering. Though most of the time I would say the way this is being done is not malicious, it's just lazy. It's just caused by a lack of imagination or dedication to powerful story-telling, so what you end up with is a very superficial, two-dimensional version of what Afghan society or what the war in Afghanistan looks like.
Then you also have the sort of crimes of omission, where basically news or documentaries since the start of the war have been about 99% about foreign troops. Now that is a very important story, but you're also missing out a huge part of the story, and that's the experience of the Afghans. So now when most of the NATO troops left, now you almost never see news about Afghanistan, even though that war has gotten worse. Essentially a new war has begun, which will probably be longer and more brutal than the war that NATO fought.
So I'm sort of the angry man in the corner who wants to poke people with a stick and say, "hey, by the way, this is still going on. And I don't want to blame filmmakers and journalists, either. That's just how the system operates. Mainstream, network news is not currently designed to give you a long-term, nuanced picture of what's going on. It gives you immediate information now, news that's relevant to you and your country.
I'm not saying that people in that industry are evil, the industry just lacks a lot of depth.
What does it mean to you to be able to play in these countries, which you describe as not being sort of "neutral" territories?
Well, our government, whether we like it or not, went to war in Afghanistan. We were complicit in that war. Totally regardless of whether we think what we did was right or wrong, or the consequences good or bad, we were involved in that war. Deeply, intimately and very closely involved in that war. So we need to work out the consequences of our actions.
One has a responsibility as a human being to understand that. But also from a very practical level, if we (or our government and military) want to understand how our country goes to war and what happens when we go to war, we need to understand the consequences. Instead of just looking at the metrics of what happens or at what they can put on paper in a report, they need to look at the long-term human cost of the war. We're talking about what happens now that NATO has left Afghanistan. They don't do that though, and we no they don't, because we asked twice (one of the British military and once of the American military) to debrief with them on what we were seeing during the course of making this film. They had never seen it before, or they thought they didn't have the capacity to do what we were doing. They were very interested in what we were seeing though.
So for me, the film is a story. But for people in the military, it's a document of a critical time in the war.
What about conveying this information to the public, what does that mean to you?
My priority in making a film is always just to tell a good human story. I don't want to educate people or give them a political message. What I hope for the average viewer, though, is that they just watch this film and think, "yeah, okay, I can understand this guy." I can understand this voice, and I can understand these fears or this dream for a country. And I can understand the pain they're going through and the weird decisions they may have lead them to join the army. I just want people to be able to relate to them. Then on a bigger picture, maybe I hope for them to think, "okay, so these are the consequences of my government going to war."
And do you want to keep making documentaries in future, or do you also have some fiction projects in mind?
Yeah, I do. I came into cinema through fiction. I haven't ever directed a fiction feature of my own, but that was always my first love. So yes, I would love to make fiction films, and I do have ideas I'd like to do. I just also have lots of documentary ideas I'd like to make, which get in the way. I'm sure I will make a fiction at some point, I'm just getting there very slowly.