This is different: Heineman keeps filming even after his escorts leave, risking his hide to document the alarming short stretch before the capital fell to Taliban control.
#Ex coming back during retrograde 2020 tv#
Yes, TV viewers saw even more shocking images of the exodus, as desperate people clung to the wings of departing planes. His cameras are right there in the fray, as Afghan soldiers fire warning shots over the heads of the crowd, and right away, we sense the danger this small filmmaking team put themselves in to bring us this account. Heineman begins at the “end,” as people swarm on Kabul Airport hoping to get out. His focus is nearly always on faces - no-nonsense Green Berets scanning the horizon through seen-it-all eyes, native Afghans with dusty cheeks and scared, uncertain expressions - during the final chapter of American occupation. Here, the fearless helmer, who shot most of the film himself, brings back hi-def vérité footage that looks sharper and more artfully framed than most Hollywood features.
Visually speaking, all of Heineman’s movies stand apart (including his terrific 2018 scripted debut “A Private War”). Over the past two decades, we’ve gotten more Afghanistan documentaries than we can count, but none of them looks quite like this. The Taliban won’t be using these bullets. For Heineman, that meant capturing all kinds of cinematic sights: A brawny soldier smashes a heap of computer monitors, helicopters airlift vehicles out, and things go boom as a team tosses all remaining ammo into a trench, douses it in gasoline and lights the pile with a well-aimed rocket. The title, “ Retrograde,” refers to the process by which military forces extricate themselves from conflict, removing or otherwise rendering useless the equipment they’d used to engage the enemy. In that moment, what might have been another business-as-usual desert war doc - with routine patrols, precisely targeted drone strikes and soldiers expressing their ennui - shifted to something audiences hadn’t seen before. That changed almost as soon as Heineman arrived, as the Biden administration made plans to pull out. At that point, Osama bin Laden had been dead a decade, the Taliban was weakened but not defeated, and the U.S.-trained Afghan Army was holding its own fairly well - and yet, nearly 20 years in, there was still no end in sight for American involvement. In early 2021, while Americans were focused on the transfer of power back home, daredevil director Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land,” “City of Ghosts”) assembled a crew and flew to Afghanistan to check in on the status of America’s longest war.
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