Film: Armadillo

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 21 December 2010 05:00

Written by David D'Arcy

Armadillo
directed by Janus Metz Pedersen
written by Kasper Torsting
cinematography by Lars Skree
edited by Per K. Kirkegaard
sound design by Rasmus Winther

You won’t find a film that’s been at more festivals than the Danish documentary Armadillo. I saw it first and interviewed the filmmakers at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last summer. It was then at the Toronto International Film Festival and at the New York Film Festival.

IDFA programmers thought that it merited exposure in Amsterdam at the world’s largest documentary festival, even though the press and industry crowd at IDFA had surely seen it. The doc won the Critics' Week Grand Prix at Cannes.

Armadillo’s subject is one small part of the "coalition" offensive against the Afghan Taliban, in which US troops are augmented by European allies. The title of Janus Metz Pedersen’s feature debut comes from a base in southern Helmand Province from which the unit operates.

Metz’s to-hell-and-back story films pro forma tearful departures from girlfriends and the anxieties (feelings of "terror") of young volunteers confronting the "ground truth" of bullets flying at them, plus the boredom of viewing porn DVDs in their tents, all of which the camera scrutinizes at point blank range.

Metz and his cinematographer, Lars Skree, are also there when a well-targeted grenade from the Danes kills a band of Taliban fighters who have pinned them down. The Danes finish off their wounded adversaries with guns.

The soldiers’ unrestrained celebration of their small victory (we watch as two are decorated later) triggered outrage in Denmark, where opposition to the war is strong. Investigators are now probing the execution of the wounded Taliban. Don’t expect any convictions.

Unlike Sebastian Junger’s nuts-and-bolts Restrepo -- last year’s Sundance doc opener, which grunts its way around an observation post with American GIs isolated near the Pakistan border -- Armadillo brings an aesthetic eye to the war documentary genre.

Stark mountains in the distance frame the field of operation, and the camera lingers on the green farmlands and silent stone mounds where the Danes never seem to find friends. It also doesn’t hurt the film’s allure that some of these young troops look like movie stars.

Yet Armadillo doesn’t tell the whole story of the squad. Some of its members face charges for the killings in the film (you’ll hear more about that scandal in the interview with Janus Metz), and the Danish public got a taste of the horrors of war.

As with so many documentaries, events eclipsed the story on the screen. Even before the film premiered at Cannes (and long before the Wikileaks era), the Danish military was already wounded.

In 2009, a Danish soldier, Thomas Rathsack, published Ranger: At War with the Elite, a memoir about fighting in Afghanistan, in which he revealed all sorts of classified operational techniques. To make things worse, Danish military officials said, the book was also published in an Arabic translation.

What they didn’t say -- which was later revealed in the media -- was that the Danish military commissioned the Arabic translation to amplify Rathsack’s crime (i.e., proving that the revelations reached people who wanted to harm Danish soldiers). The scheme seems to have been part of a plan to justify a greater punishment for the former commando.

A Danish military spokesman "leaked" the news of an Arabic translation to the press, hoping to scare the Danish public. They had already felt threatened when a jihad was declared against a magazine that published unflattering cartoons of Mohammed. When the translation scheme was found out, the head of the Danish military resigned.

Rathsack’s book became a bestseller…. in Denmark. The backstory sounds like a movie to me.

Will Armadillo and its ongoing story reach beyond its natural festival audience into the US public? Considering how films about Iraq and Afghanistan do at the box office these days (even Fair Game by Doug Lyman, with a budget and Sean Penn and Naomi Watts), it’s a long shot.

Here’s some coverage of that scandal:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/05/book-scandal-denmarks-mil_n_309451.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6Jsn5XhcR8

http://dalje.com/en-world/danish-court-authorises-soldiers-afghan-memoir/276034