Daily Times

A new documentary by Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at shows the making of the Taliban air force from vestiges of US occupation.

Ibrahim Nash’at was in an editing room helping acclaimed Syrian filmmaker Talal Derki complete his new documentary, Under the Sky of Damascus when news of the Taliban takeover of Kabul came in.

“We stopped working and started watching the news on television,” says Nash’at, a Berlin-based Egyptian documentary filmmaker about the cataclysmic events that unfolded on August 15, 2021, in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of American forces from the war-torn country.

“We saw people falling from planes at the Kabul airport while desperately trying to get out of the country. I told Talal, we need to go to Kabul. I was confident I could find a way of getting into Afghanistan to meet the Taliban,” says Nash’at, recalling the point of departure of his debut documentary, Premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September last year, Hollywoodgate — co-written by Nash’at, Derki and American producer Shane Boris, who won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for Navalny last year — tells the story of how the Taliban went about completing their grip on power by using the military infrastructure abandoned by American forces.

Produced by Derki, Boris and American actor-producer Odessa Rae, the film documents the Taliban’s transition from militia to military regime, with help from the enormous military hardware abandoned by the US military. Shot by Nash’aat in the weeks following the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban in 2021, the 91-minute film in Pashto, Dari and English borrows its name from the codeword, Hollywood, used for the large trailer-turned-base of American forces in Kabul.

Each trailer, which housed work stations, medical supplies and even gyms, was given a numerical description like Hollywood Gate 1 and Hollywood Gate 2 by the Americans. “It had all the aspects of a CIA base,” says Nash’at, a former journalist born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to Egyptian immigrant parents, referring to the US spy agency. “The moment I saw the words, Hollywood Gate, I realised this is the movie I wanted to make.”

According to the Pentagon, the US left over 7.12 billion dollars worth of military equipment when they left Afghanistan in the middle of 2021. The Taliban, who discovered the treasure of military hardware in abandoned American bases, gleefully made it their own.

The documentary captures the consolidation of the Taliban by capturing the movements of Mawlawi Mansour, the new Taliban air force chief, and M Javid Mukhtar, a young lieutenant. “Metaphorically, this space had everything I needed as a filmmaker. The Taliban were now living within a Western space, American beds, tools and even alcohol. It was a familiar space, except now the Taliban were inside. I thought the image of this space will be strong even if the story is not strong,” says the director, who was raised in Cairo by parents who returned to Egypt from Saudi Arabia after the birth of their son.