How did you get access to film the Taliban?
Ibrahim Nash’at: I spent a decade as a journalist filming world leaders. I learned that the best way to approach leaders is by working with the fixers who are closest to them. Our executive producer, Elbanna, who is Lebanese, helped me find a way to reach a fixer who secured a meeting with one of the leaders of the Taliban.
To gain the trust of the leadership, I asked the fixer to put me in contact with a translator who could accompany me 24/7 who was a member of the group. After I arranged everything and prepared myself to go to Kabul, the fixer stopped answering my calls two days before my flight. I had already invested a lot of money and time, so I decided to go no matter what.
After I arrived in Kabul, I tried many times to reach the fixer and he never answered me nor answered the translator who was working with me. The translator and I tried to reach the leaders ourselves, but we were never allowed to meet anyone. Days were passing by and my money started to run out.
I had been paying the translator and the assistant money every day without filming anything. The moment I decided this would never work, I told the translator I would leave the country. He said, “But you already are here and you have paid a lot of money. Why don’t you just film with some younger Talibs for a little before you go?” He told me, “My cousin just got relocated to the airport. Come with me to film him and see how things go from there.” The moment I arrived at the airport, I realized that he meant the military airport, and the moment we entered the compound and they closed the door behind us and I saw the word “Hollywood Gate,” I knew this was the story I was being prepared for. I was introduced to Mukhtar who loved the idea of filming, and I knew that filming him would at least allow me to film inside the walls of Hollywood Gate.
He said, “To film with me, you need the permission of my Amir, meaning my leader,” so I met with his Amir and after a tiring interrogation, the Amir said, “You can film but you need the permission of my Amir,” and the ladder kept getting higher until it led me to Mawlawi Mansour, who had just been appointed as the Head of the Air Forces. He directly accepted my request to film Mukhtar, so I asked to film with him too and he agreed.
But that was just the beginning. The question isn’t only, “How did you get access to film the Taliban?” it’s also, “How did you keep access?” because from that moment on, I realized that I had become Sisyphus and my rock was the access. I had to keep pushing it up just to have it fall on me, and then I would need to start again. Nothing about the access was secure—it was being taken away every other day, and I had to deal with many of those who wanted to prove themselves endlessly powerful. The day I decided to leave the country, I had to let go of that rock.
Talal Derki: Ibrahim and I share the same point of view about fanatic military groups. This is how we got to be friends and artistically decided to work together. And when the Taliban took power and we saw those two, let's say, survivors who fell down from the airplane, the last airplane leaving Afghanistan the day the Taliban was taking power, we were shocked. We felt really bad that this country was now facing the Taliban and this nightmare could stay forever. And Ibrahim said, “I want to go there and film. What's the future of this country? What is making people flee in this way of madness?”
I told him, “You have two strong elements to find your subject: One, is that you have a strong religious background. Second, your journalistic background. I could have said ‘Impossible,’ but in filmmaking there is no impossible. Let's try to gain trust, because psychologically I know these leaders—when they win, they like fame, they like people to capture them with the camera. And this is the time when they can say yes.” Ibrahim knocked on all the doors. He tried, he waited, and he found his way.
IN: Though I thought that my background was what would ensure my access, their exaggerated interest in the work I did filming world leaders made me realize that what they saw in me was someone who could feed their internal image of themselves as people of power.
Ibrahim, how did your upbringing in a religious family influence who you are today?
IN: Growing up in a conservative society, at a young age I was exposed to a number of radicals who were always trying to impose their ideology on me and never allowed me to ask questions. Their pressure on me, and on all the others around me, made me rebel and stop being part of that community. In my teenage years, I started to realize the opportunistic nature of those radicals who seek power and who use the peaceful nature of the ones around them to serve their own agendas. They would spread their toxic masculinity, brutal and violent behaviors, and convince the people they are speaking the words of God to remain in power. In an economically and politically collapsed society, religion has unfortunately become the strongest tool for these radicals to control the nations.
Was it your first time in Afghanistan? And, having witnessed the fall of Kabul through the mass media, what was your feeling when you arrived in the country?
IN: It was my first time in Afghanistan. It felt post-apocalyptic, weird and sad. The Taliban were euphoric, and you could feel their internal, power-loving monster being unleashed. I quickly became silent and began observing. When it got hard, I would remember what Talal told me: “Focus on the image in your monitor, and every scene you believe could be part of your film. The emotions you’re suppressing will later be released, but the film will last forever. Cinema always wins.”
TD: We both come from Arab Muslim countries that the West entered in the name of bringing liberty or democracy and it ended up in a terrible way. In my country Syria, the weapons went into bad hands. In Iraq, in Libya, in Afghanistan, and in Yemen. So this film raises the question about this interference. The West helped the Taliban—not directly, but at the end of the day, all that technology makes the Taliban stronger. At the end of the day, we, as the moderate Muslims, bear the cost and get the damage. And as you see, it's terrible.
We wanted to capture the transition of the Taliban from an extremist militia into a military regime. We don't want to make a decision. We let the audience watch and be the judges, not us.
Ibrahim, what was it like when you first went into the Hollywood Gate complex—walking into this very American microcosm with the Taliban and seeing what was there?
IN: I entered a multi-layered universe where the cultures clash. I knew from the moment I entered this is where our film should be. I felt like Alice in Wonderland, seeing American shampoos and basketballs. Having both Mukhtar and Mawlawi Mansour agree to be filmed secured the location, which serves as a Greek theater. Even if the characters stopped filming with me, the story of the place would continue.
The story began very simply, as I thought that the Taliban would find and fix a couple of rifles. But the weapons got bigger and bigger, and the story became how they found the weapons, fixed the weapons, and how they would threaten to use them.
We found that storyline during the process of pre-editing the film during my few visits to Berlin, and it was easy to follow, since I was focused on how normal Taliban deal with weapons and carry them everywhere, and how having military aircrafts would for them represent the pinnacle of power. For someone like Mawlawi Mansour, whose father was killed by a bomb dropped from an aircraft, he would show me his weapon as a way of imagining himself in a replica of a Hollywood war film. He sought to use cinema as a means of propaganda.
How effective will this arsenal be? Did you have a sense they have enough to keep this going for years?
IN: I don’t know. They have a great number of functional weapons. They may use them to suppress the Afghan people, they may use them to invade neighboring countries, they may sell them, or they may even use them against the West. But then again, this is also what they want the world to think.
Ibrahim, even if it’s not in the film, did you have any opportunity to spend time with non-Talibani, the sort of Afghans who now find themselves living under this regime?
IN: Unfortunately, I barely had connections with normal citizens, except when you buy something from a shop or things like that. I was under constant surveillance by the Taliban, and I had no chance of being alone. And when I met normal Afghans, unfortunately they gave me a really horrible look, because they thought I'm a Taliban too.
What other obstacles did you encounter?
IN: Every day there was a challenge psychologically to keep going—having to get rid of any emotions or needs as a human being, accepting the fact that you are now part of this community and you need to live the way they live. It was constant suppression of myself.
I was never lying to them, I was never telling them, “Hey, I'm going to make you look like heroes.” I was always saying, “I will film what I see. That's my promise to you, I'm not going to interfere with what I see, I'm just going to transfer the reality as I see it.”
You see so many harsh cuts, which was a brilliant decision by our editors, Atanas Georgiev and Marion Tuor, to make the viewer observe with me
Can you talk about your relationship with each other? How did you meet?
IN: When I moved to Berlin in 2018, Talal's film Of Fathers and Sons was everywhere. After the Oscars, there was a screening in Berlin and I went. The movie destroyed me. With the conservative society that I grew up in, I could definitely see myself in the son. I was watching the Q&A of Talal afterwards and said to myself, “I’ll definitely try to meet this man.” I tried so many ways. And it never worked until he was doing his film Under the Sky of Damascus. I sent him an email saying, “I'm willing to work for free just to get to meet you.” It took some time and then he said, “I will test you for ten days” and we began a long editing process together for two years.
This was the beginning of a very strong collaboration, and friendship. We spent a lot of time and got to know each other properly. I would call Talal like my older brother, who deeply shows how much he cares for me in so many different ways. It's crazy how our friendship was built.
TD:. I wanted to support him and save him from the mistakes I had to face.
He would call me from Afghanistan and I would discuss with him in a very careful, coded way so he had someone to talk to. We knew that his life would be endangered if the Taliban knew about our partnership as I’m considered by these radical groups as someone who infiltrated Al-Qaeda in Syria. When he would come back to Berlin and we would watch the material—and I remember this feeling from my own experience—he would say, “I wish this is the last trip. I don't want to see them again. I cannot handle them again. I don't want to go back.” I said, “Of course, yeah. It's fine, it's fine, don’t go back.” I knew I had to tell him that because that is what someone wants to hear when they are just coming back from hell—they want to hear that they don’t have to go back. I knew that he would decide, “No, I have to continue.”
I remember once when I returned from filming, I said to someone from my producing team that I didn’t want to go back and he said, “No, you have to go. You have to continue,” and it traumatized me. So I would say to Ibrahim, “Everything is under control, you should not be worried. If you don't want to go, we can always find the solution to make the film work.” Many of the things Ibrahim saw in Afghanistan broke his heart and it was very difficult for him to keep filming.
Given all that you’ve both witnessed, where do you see the situation in Afghanistan going?
IN: The future of Afghanistan, if the situation remains as is, is just horrible for women, kids and for everyone there. Half of the nation is being banned from education, and there is an ongoing apartheid against women. The poverty is beyond imagination and it is the people paying the price of the sanctions and not the Taliban.
The scandal of Hollywoodgate is that the Taliban is learning from Hollywood, and attempting to make their own propaganda, to present themselves as heroes and world leaders like any other. Now that the twenty-year war is over, the propaganda war becomes increasingly important.
When you think of the film, what moment within it really stays with you?
IN: The scene in which Mukhtar comments on the new law forcing women to wear a face mask on TV by saying, “I hope that our new law is not contradicting Sharia Law,” which clearly showed that he had no idea what Sharia law is. To me this so clearly shows the Taliban’s toxic masculinity and quest for gender apartheid—as well as their ignorance about what they preach, which extends to leaders of much higher religious and military rank as well.
TD: There is a moment at the military parade that will stay in my mind for a long, long time—the way Mawlawi slapped his own soldiers, real Taliban fighters, and then a few hours later they kiss his hand, the same hand that slapped them. For me, those two moments tell a lot about the Taliban and how they control. He was so happy when the soldiers kissed his hand. So he thinks that he needs to slap more faces so his hand will get more kisses.
What do you hope the impact of this film will be?
IN: I hope the film shows the failure of the twenty-year war in Afghanistan. I hope it shows the repressive, power-hungry nature of the Taliban regime and the other leaders who would force their nations into war for their own benefits of keeping power, regardless of their nation, religion, or ethnic group. I hope it shows that propaganda has always been a tool of war and one that the Taliban are trying to use now as well. I hope that this film shows the brutality of war and the pain that it causes for generations. I know this might be idealistic to say, but my experience is that war, even if just, would still cause suffering for generations and yield a traumatized nation. In the end, only warlords benefit from war. War begets war begets war.
TD: I hope this film will be watched and talked about for years and years. This is the role of the cinema: eternity. Ibrahim managed to capture something extraordinary and he risked his life. And at the same time we are trying to bring it in the best cinematic way.
A lot of talented people worked very hard on this film. The documentary film market is flooded now and it's not easy to compete if you don't make something impressive. So my experience with Ibrahim, with Odessa [Rae] and Shane [Boris]—I learned a lot from them about making documentaries and I'm really thankful for this opportunity.
IN: The creative team was amazing. It was Talal and me in the beginning and then Odessa joining us, Shane joining us and Marion [Tuor] was with us and then Atanas [Georgiev] joined us. We were all devoted to the same goal. Then Shane and Odessa won the Oscar for Navalny and this also really helped us bring Hollywoodgate to a different level. It was truly collaborative. We all made this film together.
And what's different in this project than any other project that I’ve worked on in my life is that all of us are part of each other's lives, not just part of each other's filmmaking process. There's a lot of emotional support—when one of us is down, the others are bringing them up. We all became a big part of each other's family. Most of us were refusing to open up in the beginning, but somehow the cause of what we work on, and what we want to deliver, has gotten us all to where we are.
Ibrahim, your point that propaganda has always been a tool of war—can you speak to that in the context of conflicts in the world right now?
IN: Propaganda is a weapon to create more and more division and hatred. The war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine—we are seeing propaganda being used everywhere to create conflict, to further the idea of good guys and bad guys, to further the idea that one side is right and deserves to win and the other side is evil and deserves to lose or be destroyed. The division and hatred that propaganda sow leads only to more war and more war and more war.
In addition to the pervasiveness of propaganda in the world today, there is the pervasiveness of the actual weaponry of war, as Hollywoodgate illustrates.
IN: Yes, weapons too now are everywhere. And the issue is, what will happen with all of those weapons? Whose hands will they wind up in? As Talal said earlier, they always fall into the wrong hands, the hands of people who will use them to control others and try to take more power for themselves. We saw this in Syria when the weapons went to ISIS, we saw it in Afghanistan after the Soviets left, when the weapons were with the Taliban. And now we see it with the Taliban gaining billions of dollars of high-powered American weapons. There have been reports of some of those weapons showing up in Pakistan, in Kashmir. There’s so much propaganda and disinformation, it’s impossible to know for sure what’s true. But we do know that the weapons are tools of control, of a fascism that just keeps growing.
What do you expect the Taliban reaction to the film will be?
IN: I always try to act with integrity. I told them that I would show what I saw and this is what I tried to do with every fiber of my being. All I can control is what I do.
TD: From my experience with other extremist Muslim groups, their reaction will be to just ignore the film. If anyone asks them about the film, they’ll say, “We haven’t seen it.”
Ibrahim, do you worry for your own safety?
IN: The day I’m supposed to die, I’ll die. But having said that, we are taking all the measures we need to be taking to make sure that we are safe. And also we have no connection to them anymore.
Any last words?
IN: The place itself, Hollywood Gate, is a metaphor. It’s only a very small part of what's happening in Afghanistan. And even within it, you can see a lot of traumas. But what you don’t see in the film is the reality of the daily suffering of Afghans, suffering that has been going on for so long and that will continue until who knows when. What do we do about that? That for me is the most important question.
In the larger context of the world, I wish that governments and nations could find a way to not just be reactive when issues arise, to not just fight. How do we find a way forward that is not always to simply react and go to war?