thanks everyone. pleasure chatting with you…

Sometimes you get the most die hard fans of anti war films within the army itself. It is a weird mechanism, and you can never control the perception of a film. It is in the eyes of the beholder. With ARMADILLO we tried to as true to what we saw as possible and to explore the larger backdrop of the story through a fall from a grace narrative. But I am pretty sure that a lot of young people would happily enlist after having seen the film… it deals very directly with the seduction of war

It always seem to be the wet dream of military. Personally I think it seemed like a bit of a colonel Kurz story when General McCrystal got the sack. Armadillo shows how soldiers live in their own world, how they cultivate a group mentality that marginalises doubts, critique and questions.

Huge issue. Poppy is the one source of income that the farmers have. The war in Helmand s all about Poppy. The local “taleban leader” is a drug lord that fighting to secure his income and the livelihoods of his “subjects”. It’s very feudal in those areas

Food = Field rations (MRE’s)

We had weekly, sometimes daily, encounters with the enemy.

Nevertheless the US army advertises “Be all that you can be”. It’s not “Uncle Sam needs you”. This is the same sort of thing in Denmark.

well they are certainly not creating security for the locals, which is what the whole mission officially is about. The locals just want peace and they want to be able to grow their lands without their crops getting destroyed by the soldiers and without getting their houses bombed and relatives killed. This is prior to worrying about who is in power in faraway Kabul

The crazy thing is that some of the soldiers seem to romantisize the idea of reliving the vietnam experience. They even call it “namistan”… One should be careful drawng up too obvious parallels as the taliban for a lot of Afghans are seen as extremists. But there is definately somethng about the nature of the conflict that resembles vietnam. And I believe we have been there for a longer time now as well.

Yes, that is unfortunately the situation. And it creates a huge bias on the representation of the conflicts in that area.

Exactly. check 60

The locals are the real victims of the war… as always. But the soldiers stick to this idea that they are supressed by the taliban, and if they can just get the taliban out of the area (kill them). These people would be able to outlive their inner democratic capacities. However the taliban seem to be deeply intertwined with the locals… does this eccos past experiences?

Of course. i think they still have a long way to go

Super. Will put in some requests and great ratings myself then :-)

A Danish filmmaker friend of mine is trying to do this now. he has an Afghan background and is able to work in Helmand province where Armadillo is shot

I would love to see that film too. Western soldiers approaching the villages seen from the villagers’ POV. Unfortunately that film is very dangerous to make – impossible with my complexion. Embedding with troops was the next best thing… trying to be aware of the blind spots and of the camp mentality that develops very quickly at an army base. Often I found that soldiers had very little clue of what actually went on outside the camp, but that they had a lot of opinions about it nevertheless. The lack of transparency was a huge problem and I think it goes for all levels relating to the conflict in Afghanistan.

They have a sweeper in each battle group (4 in a platoon) and sometimes a group of engineers who are experts in handling IED threats.

Reg. the children. To me they were really an document of how impoverished people in that area are. They just came up to beg for some candy or a pen. Or because of excitement. The soldiers however saw it as proof that they were popular in the area. Have seen so many pictures of soldiers with smiling afghan children. Now I realised that these moments were always very brief encounters. It all felt like some weird sort of war-tourism to me.

It’s hard to say really. As I said before, I feel very uncomfortable round uniforms after this experience and I have become very critical to what i believe is a moment of increasing militarism in the so-called western world. One might call it a form of humanitarian-militarism, where we are trying to do good with one hand and being very coercive (Killing) with the other. I find trace of this everywhere and i think it is often unquestioned.

On a more personal level. I have stopped fooling so much around and have started taking things more seriously. I definitely dedicate myself more to the people that are important to me

One of civilisations great paradoxes… and one of the central questions of the film.

I don’t know unfortunately. Maybe if we manage to make enough noise theaters outside NY will screen the film. It is unfortunately difficult to get screens for a foreign language war doc in the US… even if it is very good ;-)
It is coming out on PBS/POV in September I think

The army tried to get their hands on our material after we shot the incident in the ditch, but we managed to smuggle it out of the camp, and I think they knew they had a bad case…. but the Danish army is fortunately not as professional in dealing with the media as I believe the US army is…