Escape from Kabul, directed by Jamie Roberts, weaves into the chaos, mixing horrific images familiar to news consumers – crowds crashing toward a closed gate, children pinned to barbed wire, agonizing people clinging to the wheels of a moving plane – first-hand accounts of evacuation. As with Roberts’ previous film Four Hours at the Capitol, which used first-hand accounts and archival footage for an on-the-ground account of the January 6 uprising, Escape from Kabul trains specifically on a distinct event: the 15 days at the airport of Kabul before the August 31, 2021 US withdrawal deadline. It is neither a story of the doomed war on terror nor an explanation of the decisions that led to the humanitarian disaster at Kabul airport – Donald Trump’s deal with the Taliban signed in Doha in 2020, which excluded the Afghan government or its misguided assumptions Biden administration for how long Kabul would hold. Instead, the 77-minute film assembles a visceral collage of archival footage (often shot on cellphones) and memories from three main parties: the US Marines tasked with keeping the airport clean, Taliban commanders storming the airport, and the full takeover. capital, and Afghan women and students who endured the painful conditions to leave. “We live in a world where it’s very difficult to make sense of an increasingly complex information landscape, an increasingly complex and fragmented political landscape,” said Dan Reed (Leaving Neverland, In the Shadow of 9/11), the film’s producer . “Hearing from people who were at the center of a big, important story that changed their lives and changed world history, they just talk to you about what it was like — at the heart of it, it’s ‘that could be me.’ he could take it upon himself to try to maintain some semblance of control as the walls close in, as expressed by several Marines whose mission is to hold the airport as Afghan civilians beg for escape. The compartmentalization is clear – as one Marine puts it in the film to force the crowds back with every good reason to leave, “It wasn’t pleasant for them, it wasn’t pleasant for us.” You could be a student, a female news anchor, a government minister for women, a family member of someone who helped the US military, faced with an impossible choice – “we could die trying to leave, or we could be killed”. says Malalai Hussainy, a first-year university student who stood for four days in sewage, oppressive heat and crushing crowds for one of 124,000 spots on a plane outside Kabul. A handful of Taliban commanders who also surrounded the airport in the final days of the evacuation have their own excuses. one remembers how American forces massacred two of his family members. Others have fought the Americans since they were children. “In the end, a mental perception, a Wikipedia perception of what’s going on doesn’t really connect you to that event,” Reed said of the collection of first-hand accounts, without narration or analysis of the film. “You’ll walk away from our documentary feeling like you understand what it was. But you won’t walk away feeling like you have a perfect understanding of negotiations [to withdraw from Afghanistan] and history.” Many of these first-person accounts were shot in Kabul in the early months of this year, when Roberts and his team negotiated meetings with Taliban leaders when it was “a stage where the country was a little bit open,” he said. (The film ends with a chilling scenario: since July 2022, the UN has confirmed many systemic violations of human rights, particularly against women, under the Taliban.) “We wanted the suicide bombers who surrounded the airport, we wanted the guy who entered on the motorcycle with his men to explain what the story was like, right from the front,” Roberts said. “That took a lot of time – a lot of meetings and a lot of work through networks, literally going when they’re at checkpoints and talking to them, going to the top Talibs and working them down.” Roberts and his team received footage of Taliban soldiers who eventually took over the airport and government buildings. The crew also worked with Afghan nationals whose attempts to leave the country had failed. “We really wanted to represent them and we wanted to do it openly so you could see their faces, so you could see them as people, that was the whole point of the film,” Roberts said. Photo: Mirwais Khan Amiri/BBC/Amos Pictures Escape from Kabul depicts a mosaic of the unspeakable – how you could be so frightened as to hand over an infant to US forces beyond the airport gates, a desperate sacrifice for a better future. what could it feel like to receive when your mission as a marine is to keep the crowd at bay for a disastrously slow evacuation process. Why would someone cling to the wing of a plane as it took off? how it might feel to see them fall back to earth. The anxiety felt by soldiers awaiting a suicide bombing. the horrifying aftermath of the survivor waking up in a bombed-out sewage canal next to his dead brothers, three of the 170 Afghan civilians and 13 American soldiers killed in the attack claimed by Islamic State. How could this all have happened in the first place. “What we didn’t expect was the sheer desperation, the fear and the willingness of people to put themselves in enormous danger to get themselves and their families out of Afghanistan,” says Maj. Jordan Eddington, one of the Marines. who maintain control of the airport. although it seems inconceivable how, given the promises made by the Western powers, this could not have been foreseen. The film does not delve into the larger chain of events for such a failure, but remains firmly rooted in the experiential. But Reed allows that “The United States and Great Britain and the allies invested in a system that was hollow, and that could never stand up to pressure, and never really committed to making a completely alternative system.” The main failure was that of imagination, “he didn’t understand how quickly the collapse would happen once it started.” “There was no respect for all those people living in this thin shell of Westernized existence in Kabul,” he added. “They were the people who bought into the dream that we sold them and then they were the people we gave up on. There’s no other way to look at it.” The documentary, then, represents a way of seeing the people who were swept up in the current of events beyond their control, who succeeded, or were left behind, or celebrated a long-lasting victory over the invading forces. “We now have the opportunity to make a lasting reminder of how messy, how bad and how horrible this can be if we’re not more careful when we turn our backs on a very expensive failure,” Reid said. “Look these people in the face. That’s how it was.”
Escape From Kabul is available on HBO in the US, BBC in the UK and Paramount+ and Binge in Australia
