Armadillo Director Janus Metz On Coming Under Fire in Afghanistan And Denmark

Janus Metz was commissioned to make one of six half-hour movies about the war in Afghanistan for Danish television. What actually resulted was a strikingly intimate feature-length portrait of military life called Armadillo, that sent shockwaves across Denmark when it was released in cinemas.

The original TV project had been conceived out of a feeling that “the war in Afghanistan wasn't resonating with Danes,” says Metz. “That no one really cared about the situation. Because even when soldiers died, it hardly even reached the news anymore.” Armadillo forced it back into the public's consciousness in ways that probably no one had expected: whilst chronicling a firefight between soldiers and the Taliban, Metz had filmed young Danes committing a possible war crime.

The astonishing scene comes near the end of the film, which follows a group of raw recruits during their first six-month deployment at the Danish/UK Armadillo base in Helmand province. Metz only expected to be allowed to spend three weeks embedded with them, and requested time at the beginning of their tour in order to capture what it feels like for soldiers experiencing combat for the first time. However, he and cinematographer Lars Skree were so successful at gaining people's trust, that they did four trips to Afghanistan, staying for three-and-a-half months. “We could more or less go where we wanted in the camp,” says Metz. “I think they felt we were honest about what we were doing and that we were not there to make quick conclusions.”

For him, the film was not about judging people but exploring the moral and ethical questions of war, and what war does “not only to soldiers that carry it out and the people that are also victims of the war, but also what does it do to Denmark or to the western world, to all of us, including the UK, obviously, that's complicit in this thing?”

The soldiers in the movie exist in a testosterone-saturated world of intense action, boredom, pornography, and violent video games. For a lot of them, “The bottom line is there is a quest for masculinity and adventure,” claims Metz, “and a quest for unleashing some sort of beastly energy that is kept in check in normal society.” One of the film's main characters, Mads, is a physically small soldier from a comfortable middle-class background, who clearly wants to prove himself as a man. By going on patrol with the troops and coming under fire with them, Metz discovered for himself how in a war zone, “you become very confronted with yourself and your own masculinity. You have to say, 'I can go out and do this and I'll come home and be alright,' or you're going to feel like you chickened out . . . I think with time I started telling myself, 'I have to do the same thing to be allowed to tell this story.'”

He laughs when asked if he ever regretted putting himself in such a dangerous situation. “I'm not this heroic filmmaker that's out to tell a story because I think it's important for the rest of the world to know. Obviously there's an element of urgency that makes you want to shoot a certain type of film, but I think also I was just stupid enough to do it.” He admits, though, that he did “start wondering, 'When is enough enough?' Because you're not there on anyone's orders. You don't have to go out on patrol.”

The risk was worth it: Armadillo offers a fascinating picture of a war in which the soldiers appear to be undermining their own aim of bringing peace and security to the local population by (accidentally) killing civilians or depriving them of their livelihoods, fuelling the very resentment and hatred that the Taliban feeds on.

Armadillo's biggest shock comes when Daniel, one of the recruits Metz was following, becomes involved in a situation where a grenade is tossed into a ditch harbouring five hiding Taliban. The wounded survivors are apparently then gunned down in cold blood. A more troubling figure than Mads, Daniel is in the army “much more for the thrill,” says Metz. “He has a dark side to him that if its not kept in check, he goes too far. And that's what happens, potentially. He doesn't back down, he's always at the front of things. And for some strange reason he's the one that's up there at the ditch, with five dead people.”

During the subsequent debriefing, Daniel coolly says the men were “liquidated in the most humane way possible.” Later, news comes through that someone has called their parents and told them soldiers shot wounded fighters and piled up the bodies so they could pose with them. What did or didn't happen is not entirely clear in the film. But the military were sufficiently worried that they tried to seize Metz's footage. 

“We were in a very unpleasant situation,” he says. “The film was shut down for several days and we had to smuggle some of the material out of Afghanistan. There was a real stand down in the middle of the desert. Obviously we didn't have anywhere to go. You're either inside the camp or you're outside with the Taliban. Everything that happens in Afghanistan happens on military terms.”

Armadillo's screening in Cannes last year provoked a heated debate in Denmark about what the country was doing in Afghanistan, and about whether or not a war crime had been commmitted. Although an investigation was launched, no one has been convicted. Metz isn't sure if they filmed a criminal act, though he is convinced that such incidents happen all the time in war. 

Ultimately, the “scariest” aspect for him was “the blind fact that everyone thinks what happened was okay,” he says. “That they deserved to be shot, no matter if they were crawling away or whatever they were doing.” 

The soldiers involved in the attack feel Metz betrayed them and the recriminations have obviously been painful for him. Nevertheless, he is in no doubt that he had a responsibility to tell the story the way he did.

“If we don't somehow disclose this camp mentality," he says, "then we have no way to keep the military in check.”

© Stephen Applebaum

Luis Mandoki: Innocent Voices

Suffer the Little Children

300,000 child soldiers are fighting around the world at any one time according to Amnesty International. This statistic is staggering but gives no insight into the trauma experienced by children caught up in war, or its lasting impact. And it is not just the kids who fight that suffer, but any child who lives surrounded by the violence, danger, and constant fear of death that war brings. Children are often its forgotten victims. The Mexican director Luis Mandoki therefore hopes that his acclaimed new film, Innocent Voices, will help us remember them.

Whilst the setting is El Salvador during the country’s 1980-92 civil war, the film-maker reveals he had a different arena in mind. “I made this film,” he explains in heavily accented English, “because it tells you what’s happening inside the lives of children inside the schools and inside the houses while the bombings in Iraq are happening, even though it takes place in El Salvador.”

Written by Oscar Torres, who based his screenplay on his own experiences, Innocent Voices is a people’s take on war seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old called Chava. Like all children, he just wants to play. However, his is a childhood marked by the murder of friends, fire fights, bombings, and the knowledge that when he turns 12, the army will try to conscript him. Torres actually avoided capture and stayed with the FMLN rebels, on and off, for six months. When he was 13, he fled to the United States and settled in LA.

Mandoki, who has a string of Hollywood films behind him starring the likes of Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Jennifer Lopez and Meg Ryan, met Torres when the Salvadoran was appearing in an AT&T commercial Mandoki was directing. “I was fed up with the kind of movies that I was doing,” he recalls, “so when this script came I read it, and it was like a wash over. There was no doubt that was my next movie.” He did not know then how much of a roller coaster journey he and Torres were embarking on.

As they worked on the screenplay, it became clear that Torres’ psychological and emotional wounds were far from healed. He had initially wanted to tell the story of the music that inspired him during the war, but Mandoki was more interested in the story of Chava. When he pushed Torres to put more of his life into the piece, the writer’s unresolved feelings about the past made him resist.

“War doesn’t end when it ends,” Mandoki reflects. “It changes people and war survivors carry that war for the rest of their lives. Oscar didn’t know if leaving was the right thing, because he abandoned his family; because he abandoned people that stayed to fight. So there was this guilt.”

The process was forcing Torres to confront thoughts and emotions he had repressed. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Chava picks up a gun and points it at a child soldier. But instead of shooting he drops the weapon and runs away. When Mandoki asked him if he had ever pulled a trigger, Torres brushed the question aside. The director persisted but got nowhere. “I grabbed a chair and launched it against a wall and said, ‘Fine, if you don’t want to go the full way, fuck you.’ And I left the room and got in my car.” Mandoki returned an hour later to find Torres sobbing. He asked him again why he would not talk about not firing when it was such a heroic act.

“Oscar said, ‘I feel really bad about it because I almost killed another boy, and that’s something that’s always haunted me.’ I said yeah, but you didn’t. And then his face changed again and he said, ‘But I should’ve, because that kid killed my friends and other people. I also feel like a piece of shit because I left.’ He couldn’t stop crying, he was very emotional, and then I realised why he’d resisted, because once you go in there, all this stuff comes out. So we spent hours just talking about it.”

Incredibly, Torres’s original screenplay did not include the round-ups of boys by the army. It was only when Mandoki asked him why children were hiding on roof tops that he told him it was to avoid capture. He had not thought it was important. “For him that was every day life,” says Mandoki, “and as we started talking about that, I was surprised. I didn’t know about it. I started researching it, through UNICEF and Amnesty, finding out that that problem was real then, but it’s also real today."

The film damningly implicates America in the training of child soldiers in El Salvador, and both writer and director believe that this partly explains why the film – Mexico’s entry for the 77th Oscars - received little support in the US, despite a strong reaction when it was screened at the United Nations.

“Children were born to play, not carry guns. And I think we need to become aware that all the children of the world are our children,” says Mandoki passionately, “and that we need to stop the craziness, and the crazy world that we’re creating for them.”

Clearly for both him and Torres, working on Innocent Voices has been a life altering experience. Mandoki was effectively counsellor and collaborator, but says the movie was just as therapeutic for him. “You realise how tough life can be. We have it easy and sometimes we take it for granted. Touching on a story like that changes you.”

Mandoki laughs that his agent is now frustrated because he has been turning down projects that he would have done in the past. He was due to direct an adaptation of The Winged Boy, for example, but dropped out to film the left-wing candidate Lopez Obrador during his campaign for the Mexican presidency. When Felipe Calderon won the July 2, 2006, election by a whisker, Mandoki produced footage of alleged vote rigging.

The director now believes that the questions he was driven to ask himself about his life and work making Innocent Voices led him to the documentary. “Now it’s hard to find something that means something,” he says. “So the dilemma is now in terms of which way to go. What I do know is that something has to hit me. It’s like you found your own power in terms of what you can do and how you can give something, and you’re not willing to settle for less.”

Originally published in The Big Issue

© Stephen Applebaum, 2007