INTERVIEW: Young students in Kabul are focus of ‘Angels’ doc
Photo: Angels Are Made of Light is the new documentary film from director James Longley. Photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film / Provided by press site with permission.
Angels Are Made of Light, the new documentary by James Longley, details various stories in war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan, with a fine focus on three brothers named Sohrab, Rostam and Yaldash. The film, which recently finished its celebrated run at New York City’s Film Forum, is a complex and intimate portrait of a modern city still dealing with the aftermath of modern war.
Longley is an accomplished documentarian who was nominated for an Academy Award for his film Iraq in Fragments, which tells the story of post-war Iraq in three chapters. Although Angels is a different country with different stories, there is a common denominator of looking close at a society ravaged by conflict and trying to put back the pieces of the neighborhood.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Longley about Angels, which will soon open at the Alamo Drafthouse Park North in San Antonio; Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon; and Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
How did you find the story of these three brothers in Afghanistan?
Making a documentary is all about access. If you have good access and permission to film, you can do anything — but getting that access is often more challenging than making the film itself. It was a long and winding road to making the film in Afghanistan. I went through a couple other countries first in pursuit of the filming access I needed.
I started the project in Iran in 2007 with the idea of making an observational documentary film at a boarding school in the Alborz Mountains. It took a long time, but managed to get formal filming permissions from someone high up in Iran’s security establishment; I was the first American since the 1979 revolution to have that kind of free filming access in Iran. Filming on that project was stopped following the Green Uprising in the wake of the 2009 Iranian presidential elections when all foreign journalists were kicked out of the country, and I had to find a new home for it.
In 2009, I took the film project to Pakistan. After much location scouting and paperwork I started filming in the largest private orphanage in Pakistan in 2010. It was housed inside a beautiful ancient building that had been a girls’ school before partition. Sadly, in 2011, several political scandals between the U.S. and Pakistani governments — including the Raymond Davis incident and the assassination of Osama Bin Laden — led to many U.S. passport holders losing their Pakistani visas, including me.
Once again, after years of research and preparation for filming, political upheavals meant it all came to an abrupt end. After being expelled from Pakistan I decided to move the film to Afghanistan in 2011.
In Kabul, I looked at eight different schools, three hospitals, an orphanage — trying to find the right place to finally make the documentary. In the end, I settled on the Daqiqi Balkhi school in a working-class neighborhood of Kabul’s old city.
One of the main reasons I decided to stick with that school was that one of the women teachers, Teacher Fazula, gave us permission to film her family. Once I had her permission to film, along with the formal ministry permissions, I could start making the film in earnest. It took several years and three countries to get the filming access, but in the end the hard work that went into getting the access and filming the material resulted in a unique documentary film, the like of which nobody else has ever made in Afghanistan.
Do you feel that American viewers have largely turned away from Afghanistan and its present-day challenges since the scale down of U.S. troops in the country?
I don’t think it’s fair to say that American viewers were ever really focused on Afghanistan, before or after the Obama-era troop draw-down. The only documentaries that have received wide distribution here have been about U.S. soldiers fighting in Afghanistan, and not about the country or its people. My ambition was to make a film that would let Americans see what they have been missing all this time: a real look at Afghanistan, instead of all these navel-gazing war films that are really only about us.
What were some of the unique challenges of this particular production?
I mentioned that it took almost four years, two other countries and countless attempts to get the film started. Once I had the filming access, the challenge was maintaining that access for the three years of production. Since my film is not about an individual story, but rather about the life of a community, it was necessary to engage in complex diplomacy on the community level to make sure that I could continue filming without problems for a such an extended time. This meant meetings with local neighborhood leaders and maintaining good relations with everyone that I would pass on the street. It was a lot of work beyond the actual filming, and in addition to all the formal permissions I had to procure from Afghan government ministries.
There were also difficulties filming women. As a western man, filming women and girls in a conservative society like Afghanistan is extremely problematic, and it took extra effort to ensure that women would have a strong voice in the finished film.
What is it about Afghanistan that has inspired you to tell several stories about the country?
Afghanistan is a unique and fascinating country that deserves to be respected and understood. Afghan people have suffered the destruction of their country at the hands of foreign powers fighting proxy wars for 40 years, and we in the United States hold much responsibility for that destruction. As Americans, with our military occupying their country and our foreign policy deeply impacting them, it is our obligation to know Afghanistan and work on behalf of its people. Anything else would be pure arrogance on our part.
What do you hope the audience takes away from the documentary?
Documentaries have a different reason to exist than fiction films. In my conception of them, documentary films are like the training modules in the film The Matrix (1999), or perhaps like the memory implants of Blade Runner (1982). Instead of emerging saying — like The Matrix’s Neo — ‘I know kung-fu’ I want the viewer to emerge saying “I know Afghanistan.” I want you to feel as if you have been there and lived it, receiving virtual experience and memories that can substitute for lived experience in the real world.
This documentary is designed to give viewers an honest and complex mental model of a prototypical Afghan neighborhood which can be extrapolated to the broader society. I am not only trying to tell you individual stories, but rather to give you a better sense of Afghanistan as a whole. A deeper understanding of the people, the place, the culture, the religion, the history — the way everything feels when you are there — that is what viewers of Angels Are Made of Light can expect to receive. This is the purpose of the film.
Does the filming on such an intimate level get easier as you get to know your subjects? Did you find your footage from the end of the process was more revealing compared to the early days?
I would say that our material got better as I went along — time is a huge factor, but also the scope of the film simultaneously expanding. In the beginning I focused on building the relationships with people, building trust. By the end we had expanded our view to include national politics and history — it was an ever-expanding focus that is mirrored in the finished film. It was a multilayered process in which our access improved at the same time that my personal understanding of Afghanistan grew deeper.
At the same time, the people we were filming trusted us more and more, and better understood the filmmaking process itself by being part of one. The people in the film are active, thinking participants. They understood what we were trying to do, and as time went on, they were more able to help us make the film.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Angels Are Made of Light, directed by James Longley, is now playing in theaters across the United States. Click here for more information.
