Remember Afghanistan? If you’ve never been there, probably not. Even after two decades during which nearly a million American soldiers have cycled through it and thousands have perished, in the United States we still - collectively - have no clear memory of Afghanistan.
In our collective consciousness, Afghanistan exists perhaps as a blur of disjointed images from fiction films and war footage viewed through a raster of pixels: mountains, deserts, soldiers, fundamentalism, refugees and armed conflict.
Our national conception of Afghanistan lacks human dimension and realism. Because it is difficult for us to accurately imagine Afghan people, it is consequently difficult for us - collectively - to develop the kind of understanding and empathy that comes from spending time with others.
We cannot understand Afghanistan in its physical reality and human complexity because most of us will never go there - most of us probably *should* never go there. At the same time, we are missing the kind of mediated, virtual experiences - I mean films, for now - that would give us sophisticated memories of Afghanistan by proxy.
I believe this is a real problem. Not an Afghan problem. An American problem. A problem with how we fail to see a place, to develop understanding for a people even two decades after having invaded and occupied them with our massive boondoggle military. It is a problem of both the Left and the Right, the rich and the poor.
Because I am a documentary filmmaker, I determined to use my medium to help solve this problem. I decided to make a film that would give Americans the kind of realistic and detailed window into the Afghan human reality that we have been missing.
I determined I would build an extended memory implant of a Kabul neighborhood, together with the people who live in it: The faces, physicality, personalities, voices - including the innermost voice - their dreams and memories of a national history. With this extended memory, my theory of art goes, Americans will automatically tend to think more of Afghanistan as a real place in which real, complex people live. People of value and worth. Dear people, dear to ourselves. People not to be feared, but to be understood and befriended. People who are already members of our family.
With a MacArthur fellowship as my funding source, I researched the subject and then moved to Kabul. I made myself busy in Afghanistan, developing local contacts and hiring translators, scouting filming locations, haunting the myriad government ministries in my endless quests for written permissions - and then making friends with families, with community leaders, with the doormen, the gardeners, the drivers and cart pushers, the blacksmiths and tinsmiths, the bakers and grocers, the tailors and barbers, the teachers and the students - and filming, filming, filming.
Our skeleton crew of Afghans and I filmed and translated continuously for three years straight in Kabul in order to gather the material to meticulously rebuild the world of the school - the neighborhood, Kabul, and its inhabitants - and their thoughts - in film form, complete with the passing seasons and historical memories recreated through 35mm archival material. It was an ambitious and complicated undertaking. It became impossible to hold all the elements in ones head at the same time, there were so many interlocking pieces.
What emerged from post production several years later is the film Angels Are Made Of Light. It exists not to tell you a contrived or convenient story, but to enlighten you through the simulation of place and lived experience.
Beyond that, Angels Are Made Of Light provides a real grounding in Afghan popular political feeling in the last half of the American occupation. When it was completed in 2018, our documentary informed viewers that the future of Afghanistan was Islamic rule. The film accurately shows the popular dissatisfaction with the U.S.-backed government, and the general dissatisfaction with the corrupt crony capitalism that was being sold to Afghans as democracy. The strongest narrator character in the film blames the United States for the ongoing war in Afghanistan, suggesting that Afghans have been forced to accept a false choice.
In short, among the many things that it does, our film accurately predicts the future of Afghanistan - the collapse of the US-backed government, and the return of the Taliban.
You can still experience this documentary and feel the moment in history that it contains. Our crew have gone to considerable lengths to make it easy even for people who may never travel to Afghanistan to nonetheless form complex, accurate and multidimensional memories of this beautiful country and its wonderful people. I hope you will take the time to experience it for yourself.
Angels Are Made Of Light is now available in the United States for rental and download from iTunes/Apple TV.