Hollywoodgate is a glimpse of the Taliban at work

This revelatory film follows two soldiers in Afghanistan during the country’s regime change.

Last summer Channel 4 aired Evacuation, a three-part documentary about the airlift from Kabul Airport before Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August 2021. It cut together footage shot by a combat film team with intense interviews with British soldiers, letting the camera linger on their faces as they sat in silence after they had delivered their testimony, struggling to keep their composure. This was a dramatic, compact story, brilliantly told, ending as the last plane lifted off.

Hollywoodgate, a very different form of documentary, picks up where Evacuation finished. Ibrahim Nash’at, a 34-year-old journalist and film-maker from Egypt based in Berlin, saw these chaotic scenes and went to Afghanistan – although he had never been before – to observe the Taliban installing their regime. He hoped to film the central decision-making body, the shura, but got nowhere with that unrealistic ambition. Instead, he met a low-level Taliban soldier, MJ Mukhtar, eager to be filmed, and, through him, his boss, the newly appointed commander of the Taliban’s air force, Mawlawi Mansour. Playing on their vanity, Nash’at filmed them with a small hand-held camera for several months as they took over the vast, hastily abandoned CIA complex known as Hollywood Gate, full of supplies, weapons and aircraft.

Nash’at’s access was tightly controlled, limited to what the Taliban thought would be flattering, and his own safety was always uncertain, but he shot some 220 hours of footage. That’s been edited down to 90 minutes and turned into a loose narrative, with the help of his mentor, the Syrian director Talal Derki (Return to Homs, Of Fathers and Sons).

It’s classic fly-on-the-wall cinema: scenes shot in one take, from whatever angle available. Nash’at, glimpsed occasionally in a reflection, makes himself as inconspicuous as possible, head down, following his subjects from a tactful distance, often being fiercely glared at by bystanders. He doesn’t try to interview anyone and there’s no voiceover. Evidently, Nash’at often only understood what was being said around him after the event – Mansour, for example, announcing to his men: “If his intentions are bad, he will die soon.”

Nash’at makes modest opening and closing statements, explaining he could film only what the Taliban wanted him to see: “Between the gates of what they wanted and what I came to do, may I show what I saw.” The composer Volker Bertelmann, who won an Oscar for the score of All Quiet on the Western Front, contributes a poignant soundtrack at times. Otherwise we are left to draw our own conclusions, to find our own moral compass. Nash’at is an admirer of the great documentary-maker Frederick Wiseman, and it shows.

What we see is often both scary and laughable. Ultimately, of course, none of this is funny, because what Hollywoodgate tracks is the consolidation of Taliban power with the recuperation of $7bn worth of abandoned American military equipment. This culminates in a grotesque parade at Bagram airfield celebrating the anniversary of the Taliban’s victory, complete with recommissioned fighter planes and the “suicide bombing battalion” zipping by on motorbikes.

Yet Commander Mansour is ludicrous. Beginning as a grinning buffoon, unable to do simple sums, he grows into a pompous bully, looking forward to carrying on the war into Tajikistan, an Afghan Captain Mainwaring. At one point, Mukhtar explains why women should cover their faces with his idea of a joke. A smart Muslim had a conversation with an infidel who said women should choose what they wear. The Muslim took two chocolates. “He unwrapped one chocolate and threw it on the ground and asked the infidel to eat it. But the infidel said, ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because it’s dirty.’ So the Muslim said, ‘Our women are like these chocolates. An uncovered woman is like an unwrapped chocolate. When a chocolate touches the ground, it gets dirty and inedible.’” He’s a Taliban Swiss Toni. No women appear in the film, except beggars in the streets.

Showing Nash’at the cave he used to inhabit, Mukhtar crows: “Hey Jews, you lost the war!” He’s astonished by the technology the Americans had. “I swear if the Taliban has the same, we will rule the whole world.” At another point, he explains that his burning desire is that American troops were still there, so that he could ambush them with his machine gun. “I keep shooting, shooting, shooting, until my heart is satisfied. And then at the end I become a martyr.” No joke. Hollywoodgate is revelatory: truly brave film-making.

“Hollywoodgate” is in cinemas now