Ibrahim Nash’at knew exactly the moment to flee the Taliban.
It was July 31, 2022, and the militant regime now running Afghanistan had just staged for him and assembled foreign dignitaries a parade showing off their military might — including U.S. aircraft and other military tech abandoned by the American forces a year earlier, which the Taliban had repaired and put back into service for their own use.
“I was clocked by the secret service of the Taliban,” Nash’at told IndieWire in a new interview about his documentary “Hollywoodgate,” about the fundamentalists’ first year back in power. “And they came to me and said, ‘You have to come to our office tomorrow and show us all your footage,’ and for me this was a meaning that my mission here is completed. I was filming the transformation of a militia into a military regime, and I realized at that moment the transformation was complete.”
“Hollywoodgate,” named after the codename for a gate in a CIA compound since taken over by the Taliban air force, is a stunning inside look at how the Taliban wielded the levers of power immediately after the U.S. military’s chaotic withdrawal in 2021. Nash’at grew up in Egypt and became a journalist in part because he questioned those around him who professed admiration for the Taliban as heroes. But he suddenly found himself being confused for a Talib by the Afghan civilians he very rarely — given the short tether the regime kept him on — encountered in the year he spent in Afghanistan.
“It was always haunting me, having this look on me [that he could pass for Taliban],” Nash’at, who worked hard to receive and maintain access to the new government. “What haunted me more is the futility of the material that I was filming, and I had this fear for so long that I would not be able to convey the pain of the Afghans since I’m only dealing with the Taliban.”
After a broker who worked for the Taliban ghosted him in the leadup to the U.S. pullout in July 2021, Nash’at boarded one of the few planes back into Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath. With no contact among the militants, he stumbled upon a low-level fighter named Mukhtar, who was keen to be filmed. He asked his Amir (commander) for permission, who asked his Amir, and so on until Nash’at was granted access to the inner circle of Mallawi Mansour, the new head of the Taliban Air Force, charged with repairing and putting back into action all the aircraft the U.S. left behind.
“It was sort of this moment of euphoria over their military success,” producer Shane Boris (“Navalny,” “Fire of Love”) said. “And the necessity for administrative or bureaucratic or state legitimacy. Ibrahim was there in the exact moment where they saw in him the opportunity to articulate that.”
“They were kind of welcoming the idea of journalists, and the difference-maker for us was that we asked for permission to film for one year,” Nash’at said. His idea was this: He wanted to put on display exactly who the Taliban are, without putting his editorial thumb on the scales. The result may in fact be what the Taliban wanted to get across — shockingly misogynistic statements about women, included — and is all the more urgent for everyone else who’s not a fundamentalist to listen to: This is their stated aim for what they want to do next, including invading their neighbors and exporting their fundamentalism around the world.
It needs no editorializing. “Anybody in any country who sees this will agree it’s wrong how they leave trash or hit and abuse their own soldiers, or leave a woman to sit in the rain as punishment, or even waste all of the medicine we see them waste,” Nash’at said. It was as if the Taliban hadn’t just appropriated U.S. equipment; they also were trying to appropriate U.S. filmmaking, casting themselves as the stars in their own action movie where they do nothing but celebrate their triumph and abuse their power.
Nash’at stayed with Mansour and other Talibs as much as he could to get a fully unvarnished view of their aims, down to even living in their compound (the rest of the time he was in a hotel in or rented apartment in Kabul). His access could always be denied at any time. And so could his safety. At one point, Mansour is heard saying in the film, “If his intentions are bad, he will die soon.” But Nash’at is quick to downplay the danger he faced.
“It was my choice to go to the Taliban and live with them and do this,” he said. “But it was never the choice of the Afghans to be living in 42 years of war, to have the Soviet Union invading them and then, of course, the Brits before that and the U.S. and the NATO afterward to, to invade them. It’s not their choice to have the Taliban ruining them today.”
The person Nash’at was far more concerned for was his translator, Adel Safi. “He really saved my life in so many situations. He would be a filter to my words, if I said something that could be taken [by the Taliban] aggressively.” Not speaking Pashto — an Eastern Iranian language spoken primarily in Pakistan and Afghanistan — meant being able to keep a critical distance from his subjects. One of his requirements for getting the film distributed, however, was that Safi could be pulled out of the country. The translator is now living in Berlin and working to become a filmmaker himself.
“Hollywoodgate” is a cinematic warning. When he filmed that parade on his last day in Afghanistan, in attendance were dignitaries from Russia, China, and Iran — authoritarian regimes apparently eager to help the Taliban maintain their hold on power and further their global aims. None of those apparatchiks questioned why Nash’at was filming. “I was able to film them and have them not interact with me,” he said, because, again, they thought he was part of the Taliban, too. “I was very hopeful that they would never say, ‘Who are you?’ Or, ‘What are you doing?’” It’s truly one of the great filmmaker-as-smuggler moments in recent memory.
As for his own personal safety with the film coming out, Nash’at is not concerned. He thinks, if the Taliban realize they come across negatively in the film, they’ll simply dismiss the movie’s existence. Filmgoers, and anyone who cares about the mass suffering of the Afghan people and what the Taliban may well plan for the rest of the world in the years to come, would do very well to give “Hollywoodgate” their full attention.
“Hollywoodgate” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York City and the Laemmle Glendale.
