Egyptian journalist and filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at discusses his multi award-winning feature debut Hollywoodgate with Danish Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Simon Lereng Wilmont (A House Made of Splinters, 2022). With unprecedented access to one of the most secretive cabals in the world – the Taliban – the film begins on the day after the last US soldier left Afghanistan in 2021 and follows a group of Taliban leaders in their first year back in power.
At the beginning of their chat, Nash’at explained the project’s genesis to Wilmont.
“While everybody was leaving in September 2021, I arrived in Kabul and I tried to get access to the Taliban, and I relied on 10 years of journalism filming with world leaders to make my initial access. We made a film that tells the story of the weaponry left behind by the US, how the Taliban finds these weapons, how they try to use these weapons…[It] is made by following two protagonists of the Taliban. One is the head of the Air Forces…and the other is a lieutenant who is very ambitious and trying to get a military rank.”
“The story is filmed in a very cinematic cinema verité way. No interviews, no voiceover except for an intro voiceover and an outer voiceover to tell you how we got there and what we learned being there. But we let you live in the experience of the cameraman, which was me at that time..living the daily life of how he spent his time with the Taliban for one year filming from the inside, living in the closest rooms with them. [It is] a quite claustrophobic film, but it’s an important film to watch. And it is funny as well…”
Click on the link above to watch the whole interview between Ibrahim Nash’at and Simon Lereng Wilmont.
