Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.You expect a scandal given the name of potent new documentary Hollywoodgate. It duly comes, though not in the form you expect. The title actually refers to a US base in Kabul, Afghanistan, abandoned in August 2021 when the American military withdrew from the country after a 20-year war. The Taliban retook power in hours. And yet as desperate Afghans caught whatever flight they could elsewhere, Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at set out in the other direction.Landing with his camera, he sought to record the fate of the country. The price was a seeming Faustian pact. Nash’at was allowed to stay by Mawlawi Mansour, commander of the new Afghan air force, on the basis he only saw what Mansour wanted him to see. Officially, Nash’at was to film what amounted to a promo for the Taliban.Shot over the next year, Hollywoodgate is not what Mansour wanted. (Having worked under false pretences, the director too finally left Afghanistan in a hurry.) Yet at times, you see something the regime would enjoy: a farce in which the joke is on the US. Much of the film records the appropriation of the $7bn worth of US military equipment left behind in the chaotic withdrawal. Mansour and colleagues stride into Hollywood Gate, chuckling at the gift basket the enemy has handed them.But you may also be surprised by the theocracy in close-up. Early on at least, gunmen look buffoonish. Mansour barks orders at scurrying flunkeys, then strains on the cross trainer at Hollywood Gate’s lavish gym. The stakes are clear from overheard exchanges. If this stranger with a camera is up to no good, it is said, he will soon be killed.Another filmmaker would spotlight their own peril. Nash’at just keeps recording the brusque instructions to shoot this but not that: to film endless declarations of triumph over America; to stop when a doctor lets a trove of medicine pass its expiry date.A second focus is MJ Mukhtar, a cocksure trainee pilot now learning to fly US fighter jets. Mukhtar embodies a less bumbling Taliban: dogmatic, ambitious, wary of Nash’at but also deeply image-conscious. A crucial sequence finds repaired American military hardware paraded in front of emissaries from Russia, Iran and China: a geopolitical debutantes’ ball.What goes unseen? Ordinary Afghans. But then, the film’s sharpest insight is tied up with what is missing from the picture: none of the Taliban want Nash’at to record the actual people they govern. Of course, another absence is just as conspicuous: no American voice left to explain what the war in Afghanistan achieved, now things are again much as they were in 2001, except the Taliban have Black Hawk helicopters and a media strategy.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from August 16
