Title: 'Hollywoodgate' Shows How the Taliban Became a Military Force [theme music]

Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. In the immediate aftermath of the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan, documentarian Ibrahim Nash'at entered the country. The Egyptian journalist and filmmaker wanted to capture this transition period as the Taliban retook control. Ibrahim managed to get Taliban permission to film as the group made an amazing discovery, an abandoned American base called Hollywoodgate that was left filled with potentially useful material.

We see as Taliban leaders go through buckets of medicine, test out the gym's treadmill, examine shattered computers, and most frighteningly, as they discover part of an estimated $7 billion worth of military equipment. Over the following months, Ibrahim follows the Taliban Air Force leader as he tries to repair the weapons and fighter jets and as he attempts to take advantage of the new technology to turn the Taliban from a militia into a true military force. The film is called Hollywoodgate. It is in theaters today, and I am joined now by director Ibrahim Nash'at to discuss. Ibrahim, welcome to the show.

Ibrahim Nash'at: Thank you so much for having me.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. When did you first decide you wanted to try and film the Taliban in the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan?

Ibrahim Nash'at: When these images that we all saw in 2001 from the airport were happening and taking place. They were massively broadcasted online, you could see all of the people in the airport trying to escape the Taliban coming to power. We were shocked by the images of those two who tried to hang themselves to the airplane and fell from it. For me and for our producer, Talal Derki, we were sitting and I was like, "We have to do something about Afghanistan."

We wanted to do that because we understand that news always follow the big topic but the moment this big fuss is over, you forget. We have been for so many years, and of course, with my experience working in journalism, the huge tendency of forgetting and not really paying attention to what's going on after the big news is over. We decided that we want to go to Afghanistan and film in whose hands this country was left and follow the story of Taliban to show the world how they think. What we never expected to find was how they found all of these weapons and how they tried to fix these weapons and their plans using these weapons.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, it's shocking, really. How did you gain access to the Taliban in the first place?

Ibrahim Nash'at: I worked in journalism for over a decade and I filmed with a lot of world leaders, and that has given me somehow a very strong CV to think I could try to approach the Taliban, especially, that I was raised in a very conservative society myself. I understand somehow how can I talk to people who of that thought. I also understand the difference between someone conservative and someone that is using the power of conservative society to gain personal efforts.

Knowing this background, I took myself and I approached the Taliban. I arrived there at a time when they were quite happy to have journalists. You remember at the beginning in 2001, when they took over the power, a lot of news were coming out, "This is Taliban 2.0." They are different than the old Taliban and many fell for this. I arrived at that time and with some talkings, we were able to secure an access, but the difference between what I did and maybe other people is that we asked for an access for one year and we were giving a yes for a year in the beginning.

By the time they started to discover that this was not the right decision, maybe to make, or they started to change their mentality, "We don't want journalists," they started to tighten it up around international journalists. Of course, they have been always tightening it up on local journalists, but also, they started to tighten things up around international journalists but I was already inside and I would always try to find ways of talking and trying to convince them that this is not over yet. I haven't done my job. My job is to make a movie that is for one year. Somehow with a lot of insistence, if that's the right word to use, we were able to stay until the last day of the shooting.

Kousha Navidar: To be clear, this is 2021 when this all happened.

Ibrahim Nash'at: 2021.

Kousha Navidar: 2021, yes.

Ibrahim Nash'at: I arrived directly after the US left.

Kousha Navidar: Got it.

Ibrahim Nash'at: Between the phase of when Taliban arrived in Afghanistan and phase when Taliban were officially in power, this was the phase of me trying to get there.

Kousha Navidar: You were saying that they were actually happy to let journalists in at this time because they wanted to show Taliban 2.0. Do you think that's why they let you come in?

Ibrahim Nash'at: In the beginning, most of the journalists who tried to get an access were getting an access. A lot of big news channels fell for this and they were doing positive reviews about the Taliban and they were saying, they are different, they are going to let women. They were giving them a place to talk and they were giving them platform to represent themselves. This was happening in the beginning.

Then directly within four or five months, when the negotiations of them getting an approval from the US to be the official government of Afghanistan were not going the way they wanted, they started to tighten things up. They stopped women from going to school, they stopped them even from going to public places and go to the park. They stopped dealing with a lot of people, and they started to tighten on journalists, and they started to become the Taliban that we know today.

Kousha Navidar: One thing that sticks out in the documentary is the language gap. How fluent are you in Pashto and Dari? Because how much could you understand what they were saying? It seems like at some points in the documentary, they're talking about you like you're not even there.

Ibrahim Nash'at: I don't understand the language, which was, in my case, a bless, because it kept the distance between me and them that it has to go through an interpreter, and the interpreter would talk to them. I was very happy to have met this very, very brave guy who really risked his life to help me do the movie. From the beginning, he translated once when they spoke badly about me and this has given me something like a little panic attack. I asked him never to translate this again. All the way till the end, he never translated it. Definitely, after the production was over, we had to pull him out of Afghanistan and he lives now in Berlin. We were sitting in Berlin and talking, he was like, "Ah, by the way--" there are all of these huge times when they spoke really badly about you and I was always trying to find ways of not telling you.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. You said in your director's statement that, "From a young age, I was exposed to many who portrayed the Taliban as heroes. In my adolescence, I began to question this belief, and that questioning led me to a career in journalism." How did you first begin to have doubts about the beliefs people around you had about the Taliban?

Ibrahim Nash'at: Questioning is the key to everything. If you question, you know from the answers that you receive, if the person in front of you is always forcing you to not think and just do, then you know that there's something wrong and this was what I discovered. You keep discovering that even everywhere. Today, part of our movie is that it's a movie about propaganda. It makes you understand that this is what they want to do. They want to show their own propaganda because we question how they try to present themselves. When you show a movie about propaganda, you take off its power.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking with filmmaker Ibrahim Nash'at. It's a conversation about his new documentary. He's director of the new documentary Hollywoodgate. It's in theaters now. Let's go to opening Hollywoodgate. You were there when the Taliban entered this complex. You saw what was left behind by the Americans who had occupied it. What were the Taliban most excited about?

Ibrahim Nash'at: Weapons. Yes, weapons. They were excited about weapons, and you see in the movie their excitement about weapons and their plans how they tried to fix these weapons, what they plan to do with these weapons. What was shocking the most to me is that they found also a huge amount of medicines, medicine that they could have used to fill a full hospital. What we see throughout the film, that although they were able to sit and fix weapons, they are not able to do anything with the medicines, and all of these medicines expired, unfortunately.

Kousha Navidar: In the documentary as well, I saw a bunch of cracked eggs everywhere. What was that about? Do we know?

Ibrahim Nash'at: No. It was very funny to me that people eat the eggs and leave them, and it felt like the previous government, like the people who were in the place, either the Americans or the Afghan National Army, when they were leaving, they didn't care really, about cleaning the place.

Kousha Navidar: It was just left in complete disarray, and there happened to be just so many eggs everywhere. What do we know? You had mentioned the weapons. What do we know about why so much of this military technology was left behind? Did everything just happen too fast, or is there some other reason behind it?

Ibrahim Nash'at: It's a question that we are asking ourselves in the film.

Kousha Navidar: Okay.

Ibrahim Nash'at: That's our question.

Kousha Navidar: What about for you? I don't have a sense of it?

Ibrahim Nash'at: I don't have a sense of it because it doesn't make any sense to me that you would leave that, but also what doesn't make sense to me that you would, in the first place, go and have this mentality of a forever war, that you go in a country and you stay there for 20 years, claiming a lot of things, claiming that you're making the place better, claiming that Afghanistan tomorrow is going to become better, claiming that you're going to end terrorism.

The outcome of that, after spending billions and billions and billions every single day, is that you left Taliban with weapons. The people of Afghanistan, who have never had a choice to either have the Taliban be in power with them today, or had a choice to have the Americans and the NATO invade their country for 20 years, or have the Soviet Union invade their country for ten years and all of that was not a choice. They were all the time obligated, and everybody claimed to save them, but they are left on their own today.

Kousha Navidar: Clearly, attempts were made to make the aircraft that was left behind unusable, and yet the Taliban was able to repair the planes and to fly them. How big of a lapse was this by American forces do you think?

Ibrahim Nash'at: It's clear how big it is because it's in the hands of the Taliban today.

Kousha Navidar: When you were there and they were discovering this equipment and these aircraft, how was their reaction? What was the confidence level that they had with which they said, "Okay, we can actually use this equipment, we can repair it."

Ibrahim Nash'at: To be honest, for me, I never believed that they can fix it. Whenever they say, "We can fix that," my reaction is that, "Of course, you can fix that," throughout the whole process. I was not believing that this is going to happen until the last moment. Maybe my heart doesn't want to believe. Maybe my judgment of me understanding the difference between sophistication and simplicity, and judging from my own side, that one has to be very sophisticated to do such a work and I've seen them as very simple people that doesn't understand how to do something like basic math. The 67 x 100, they couldn't calculate that. For me, maybe I was--

Kousha Navidar: Just to be clear, this is a part of the documentary where they're doing mental math very incorrectly by an order of magnitude, right?

Ibrahim Nash'at: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: They're doing, I think, 67 x 100 or something. Is that right?

Ibrahim Nash'at: 67 x 100.

Kousha Navidar: Sorry, I interrupted you. Go ahead.

Ibrahim Nash'at: For me, this has reevaluated the way I see the situation. I should not be judging to see the world from my own point of view, rather than I need to see what others are doing so I could find the solution rather than just imposing my own mentality on others, thinking that this is the only solution.

Kousha Navidar: Listeners, we're talking to director Ibrahim Nash'at. He is the director of a new documentary, Hollywoodgate, in which he spends an extended period of time with the Taliban after the US withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in 2021. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk some more about Ibrahim's experience with Taliban leadership and go into the documentary a little bit more. Stay with us.

[theme music]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar. We're here with filmmaker and director Ibrahim Nash'at, the director of a new documentary called Hollywoodgate. It's in theaters now. Ibrahim spent time with Taliban forces in 2021 in Afghanistan after the US's withdrawal of its troops. The documentary looks at the aftermath, especially, with the discovery of $7 billion worth of military equipment that was left by US forces. Ibrahim, before the break, we had talked about what you had felt, what you had seen based on the Taliban forces. I'm wondering for you, what's something that you learned about the way Taliban leadership operates over the course of filming?

Ibrahim Nash'at: Before I answer this question, I have to first say that, yes, I did spend one year in Afghanistan without my brave interpreter, who now lives in Berlin, that we had to pull out. Also, I was supported by a huge team from people like the most experienced people I've never dreamt of meeting or having a master class with. Suddenly, I found myself in the edit room with people like Shane Boris, who did Navalny and Fire of Love and Edge of Democracy, people like Talal Derki, who did Fathers & Sons and The Return to Homs, people like Odessa Rae, who did with Shane [unintelligible 00:14:18].

People like Atanas Georgiev, our editor who did the brilliant movie Honeyland, and also our other editor, Marion Tuor, Diane Becker, Mohamed Al Banna, and the list can go really on and on and on with this movie was done by experts from the highest level that they were able to bring the quality of the film to a standard and a level that I never even dreamt of watching, not just being part of making. You can say that.

Kousha Navidar: I want to get to the Taliban leadership. You bring up something really important, which is the kind of village that it took to bring this movie to bear. Were those folks that you met afterwards, did you know you were going to work with them beforehand or did you just go get the footage, and then you said, "I'll figure it out as I go along?"

Ibrahim Nash'at: I was supported by Talal Derki from the very first second and Talal did of Fathers & Sons, which he left. He went and lived with Al-Nusra in Syria or Al-Qaeda in Syria for two years, making a movie that was nominated for an Oscar in 2019. He's done a pretty similar quest to make a movie and I learned a lot from him and also from my business partner, Mohamed Al Banna, who was with me from the very first second.

The rest of the team joined us at a later stage when we felt safe to speak about the film because I was so afraid that the Taliban might know that I'm working with someone else, or I was so afraid that someone might go and tell them, "Hey, watch out from this guy." For protection, we were keeping the material not known to anyone that this is being made.

Kousha Navidar: Well, that's such a good segue into what I was originally asking you about at the top of this part of the segment, which is what's something that you learned about the way that Taliban leadership operates from staying with them for so long?

Ibrahim Nash'at: Unfortunately, Afghanistan is a country that has been in war for so long and there has not been an example of a government that is functional and good. The corruption was very high in the previous government. Taliban are no different than the previous government in that aspect that you could see the corruption happening, but I could not really speak of what's happening today in Afghanistan.

I've not been able to go back to Afghanistan since the last shot of the film, it's too dangerous for me to go back there. What I know is that Taliban are becoming stronger and stronger and stronger every day and they are becoming more radical in presenting their extreme ideology and not the side that could maybe give the Afghans some hope.

Kousha Navidar: One of the main subjects of your film is Mawlawi Mansour, who's the head of the Taliban Air Force. Describe him a little bit. What's his leadership style?

Ibrahim Nash'at: His leadership style is that throughout the film, you could see the personality changing. When he started, regardless of how his past was. I'm just talking about what I saw because I could not say that this is a movie about Taliban. This is a movie about my experience living with the Taliban. It's not the truth. I cannot tell you this is the truth. This is what I saw. I'm only bringing you what I saw and hoping that you would understand that this is what I saw.

For me, at the beginning, he was trying to be a good leader and he was trying to be different. He was saying the old leadership was not as good and he was trying to bring in the hero. He sees himself as a hero. Then by the time you see that he sits in for becoming a regime, he would slap people on their faces, he would shout, he would sign papers without reading what is he signing. Then he becomes a regime. This is the trajectory of his development throughout the film. He represents the transformation of Taliban from a militia into a military regime.

Kousha Navidar: Many of these Taliban members that we see in the movie have lost loved ones during years of conflict and we hear them mention that to themselves. With you recording, Mansour's father, for example, was killed in an American airstrike. I'm wondering how you think these personal losses drive or motivate Taliban leaders.

Ibrahim Nash'at: Personal losses motivates any human being. Pain is the same everywhere. If you have pain of something, your reaction is that you either try to find a way of healing from your trauma or you just let that trauma take over you and you do bad action. In the situation of Mullah Mansour's father was killed in an airstrike and in the film, he leads the Air Forces, which is saying to me something related to wanting to have a revenge.

The other character, the younger guy, Lieutenant Mukhtar, his brother was also killed. While they are having peace, his only wish is to have the Americans come back so he could fight them and become a martyr. This is all related to the leftovers of the PTSD in war at the end.

Kousha Navidar: Part of the focus of the film is also the Taliban's treatment of women and I want to be sure that I bring that up. At one point, Mansour shares that his wife used to be a doctor, but he told her that in order to get married, she would have to stop practicing. You spent a year, not just with the Taliban Forces, but in Afghanistan at large and I'm wondering for you what was revealing to you about the way that these men talked about women.

Ibrahim Nash'at: Unfortunately, in the world of Taliban, women have been only set free to do whatever they want if they are beggars and now even they are bugging the beggars by saying begging is not allowed in the street. That's what we try to present in the film, that you only see women when they are begging because that's the reality of the word of the Taliban in that case. The way they talk about women is the way Taliban has always been talking about women and it is represented in their actions and how they apply an apartheid against women. Not allowing them to even go to a park and not allowing them to have education, not allowing them to work in so many places. If they work, they put billions of rules on them. That just makes them prefer to stay at home than working in such an environment.

Kousha Navidar: How did you find the strength to keep going throughout filming? It was exactly a year, right, that you spent there?

Ibrahim Nash'at: I spent around seven months over the course of one year and in between, I would go back to Berlin to do therapy and then come back again to Afghanistan. The main strength that kept me going was that I didn't want to be another one that came to Afghanistan and left without having done what he's supposed to do. The US claimed they are there to make the country better and they left and I didn't want to do the same.

My task was to make sure that the pain that I see in the eyes of the people that I see every single day has to be transferred. Throughout the whole process when I was filming, I was always hunted by the futility of the material that I filmed, that it might not be enough to make the movie that shows this pain ao I had to keep going until we were able to have the material that could convey the pain of the Afghans that they are facing today, not just because of the Taliban, but also because of 20 years of war.

Kousha Navidar: Was there ever a moment where you were afraid for your life?

Ibrahim Nash'at: I think I would ask the question differently, is that was there any moment that you were feeling safe? The answer would be no, because I'm around people who are impulsive, suffering from PTSD, and you don't expect what kind of reaction they would have. Even among themselves, they could at any moment start having a fight when they are really close friends. I'm someone from outside being called a spy, so it's always hard for me to keep going, knowing that at any moment they could decide that I'm a spy and get rid of me.

Kousha Navidar: It's interesting you bring that up because you're not an American filmmaker, so you're likely coming at this from less of a western perspective. What do you wish more Americans understood about the situation in Afghanistan and the effects of western intervention in the Middle East generally?

Ibrahim Nash'at: I hope that the US learns that you could never solve a problem or get rid of an ideology by conducting a war. You've tried that for so long, it didn't work. The forever war mentality has proven a failure in Afghanistan. Yet throughout the history, we just keep seeing that history is repeating itself. I hope that the world also would understand that the Taliban now has adopted a Hollywood-style propaganda that they are doing for themselves. They did not only inherit from the Americans the weapons, but they also got the mentality to do their own propaganda, which is making them stronger and stronger and stronger. I hope for a solution to the situation, especially that the west has caused a huge damage of that situation, but it's not another war because war begets war begets war.

Kousha Navidar: Going back to the documentary specifically because you mentioned the Hollywood-style tactics that these Taliban forces are using to try to control the narrative. And I'm sure that the Taliban had control over where you were allowed to go, what you were allowed to film. How did you, as a director, want to make sure that your subjects weren't fully controlling the narrative?

Ibrahim Nash'at: I think this requires the technique that we used. The technique that we use, which is to do fly on the wall or do observation in cinema. When you're not really interacting a lot with the characters, you're not imposing anything on what's happening. You just watch what's happening and be there. Over the course of one year, I was there for seven months present, even if I'm not filming, holding the camera in my hand.

My presence, either filming or not filming, the camera was always present, which made them forget a bit about me being there. That would have given me maybe within that limited space that I was given the freedom to capture the good moments that happened in front of me. So because they are not really focused to me, because I was there for like eight hours and I didn't film anything.

Kousha Navidar: Oh yes, but then you leave the camera there.

Ibrahim Nash'at: The camera was always in my hand. It's never left my hand throughout the whole period, they have never seen me without the camera in my hand. Never.

Kousha Navidar: Never. At one point, one of the Taliban members says that he's worried your film will embarrass them in front of China. Why was that a particular concern?

Ibrahim Nash'at: Yee at the end why is it a particular concern because you see some Chinese delegation visiting them and you will see also that after I was done with the filming, that China has accepted Taliban's ambassador and their country official. It's the only country where the president meth with an ambassador from the Taliban and accepted him in office.

Kousha Navidar: You're mentioning a military parade at the end of the film, and there are representatives for listeners. There are representatives from China, as you mentioned, also Russia, Pakistan, Iran. What motivation do these nations have to recognize the Taliban government?

Ibrahim Nash'at: I think that's a work of an investigative journalist or the other governments that need to figure out a way of dealing with the situation and this question is not really for me.

Kousha Navidar: I'm looking at the clock. We're wrapping up here, but there's so much to go into in this. Just some final questions about the way that you see this film. Do you know if anyone in the Taliban has seen this film?

Ibrahim Nash'at: So far, not, but we're releasing now in cinema. We were so far in festivals. We've been over 45 plus film festivals, but within the festivals, you meet the audience that are in festivals. Now, since it's going public, they may send someone to go and watch the film. I don't know. So far we don't know that they have seen it. We're going to have the film now release in New York, and then followed by LA and San Francisco, and then over so many cities around the country. In the next few days, few months, maybe we know if they saw the film or not.

Kousha Navidar: As it's released from here to San Francisco, how do you hope the film is received, but also discussed among American audiences?

Ibrahim Nash'at: We made the film about propaganda that is totally different from the majority of the films that are about such topics, where you could see that there are certain narratives in there being pushed. This is a movie about propaganda. You would understand from the very first second what you're getting into and you watch it all the way to the end to come out with your own conclusion. It's a movie that you are the judge of what's happening in front of you. I'm not feeding you anything.

Kousha Navidar: About ten minutes ago, I talked about your safety and you said, well, the lack thereof. You said that your job was to stay there as long as it took to accomplish the mission that you sent out there to do. When did you feel like you had accomplished that mission, and do you feel like you did?

Ibrahim Nash'at: Unfortunately, I didn't feel like I accomplished the mission because in the day of the parade, the secret service approached me and they said, you come to our office tomorrow with all of your material. That for me was a clock that, okay, I was filming Taliban transforming from a militia into a military regime and now the secret service is asking me to come to their office, that means it's an action of a military regime. My mission here is over, and I had to leave in the same day. Maybe if this didn't happen, I would have tried to stay longer, because we filmmakers, we love to film more and more and more and more hoping, and with this access, you want to use it to the maximum and try to get out the maximum out of it, because you don't know when will something like this be ever possible again for someone to get such an access. I had to leave when it was, for me, not just dangerous, but too dangerous.

Kousha Navidar: Well, I appreciate you coming here. I'm sure listeners do with what you were able to accomplish while you were there and bringing it to audiences across the country, across the world. We've been here with Ibrahim Nash'at, the director and filmmaker of the new documentary Hollywoodgate. It's in theaters now. Ibrahim, thank you so much.

Ibrahim Nash'at: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:28:05] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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