In August 2021, as the capital city Kabul fell to the Taliban, the west’s 20-year mission in Afghanistan, spearheaded by the US and Nato, collapsed in a single day. The Americans abandoned their embassy in panic and there was harrowing footage of desperate Afghans attempting to cling to the undercarriage of a US military plane that was taking off from Kabul airport. At least two seemed to plummet to their death.
It was while watching these scenes, at home in Berlin, that Ibrahim Nash’at decided that he wanted to make a film about Afghanistan. A 34-year-old journalist, originally from Egypt, he had never stepped foot in the country – though he had familiarity with war zones and had cut his teeth making YouTube videos during the 2011 Egyptian revolution. “The people hanging on a wheel of a plane just to leave, it triggered something in me and I couldn’t sleep,” says Nash’at, who has dense, corkscrew curls and an unblinking gaze. “I wanted to go and make a story about in whose hands this country was left.”
