Escape from Afghanistan USA, 2002 Color, 90 Minutes Executive Producer
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Russia. The film was then reedited, given a new voice and soundtrack, and released to video in 2002 as Escape from Afghanistan, which was well received by connoisseurs of gritty war films but went largely unnoticed by the wider public. One can extend this chain of forgetting in several directions: it was the directorial debut of a director now known exclusively for the blockbusters that came later in his career; it treats, in modified form, a historical event that has largely been written out of history; it recalls the ugly last years of an empire that is recalled Escape from Afghanistan today more in the forms of nightmares and fantasies than as history. USA, 2002 The film is loosely based on the so- Color, 90 minutes called Badaber Uprising. During the Soviet Executive Producer: Roger Corman military operation in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Producers: Peter Yeliferenko, John the United States, together with several other Carrington, and Maria Abakirova powers, operated a prisoner-of-war camp at the Additional Dialogue: Richard Williams Badaber Fortress, located near Peshawar in Additional Music: Mel Lewis Pakistan. In April, 1985, Soviet and Afghan Production: New Concorde prisoners at the fortress staged a revolt in which they seized weapons and occupied it. Unable to The Peshawar Waltz escape the fortress on their own, they entered [Пешаварский вальс] into negotiations with local authorities in an attempt to obtain the protection of some Russia, 1994 international organization. These negotiations Color, 86 minutes threatened to embarrass several powerful Russian, English, Pashto with Russian governments, all of which officially denied their voiceover dub military involvement in any Afghan civil war. Directors: Timur Bekmambetov, Gennadii The existence of the prisoners had become Kaiumov inconvenient and, as they were unwilling to Screenplay: Gennadi Kaiumov, Timur surrender quietly, they had to be eliminated. Bekmambetov, Rauf Kubaev Although the exact chain of events remains Camera: Fedor Aranishev, Sergei Trofimov mysterious to this day, all inmates of the fortress Design: Sabit Kurmanbekov were dead within two days of the start of their Music: Aleksander Voitinski uprising. Producers: Gennadii Kaiumov, Timur In Bekmambetov’s 1994 version of the story, the Bekmambetov burden of guilt is shifted decisively to the Soviet Cast: Barry Kushner, Viktor Verzhbitskii, military forces, which launch an aerial attack on Aleksei Shemes, Gennadii Kaiumov, David the fortress. The action of the film swirls around Kheird, Michael Karpinski two westerners: a British documentary Production: Iscona Film filmmaker and a French doctor treating victims of war under the auspices of Doctors Without Escape From Afghanistan is a film Borders. These two visitors to the prison find twice unknown. Produced and directed in 1994 themselves trapped where they certainly do not by Timur Bekmambetov and Gennadii belong but where they nonetheless continue their Kaiumov, the film played at international film work of recording and healing, respectively. festivals under the title The Peshawar Waltz, but They serve to structure the narrative of the was never released into wide distribution in film’s action while also remaining outside of it. Once the uprising begins, the film becomes exemplary of the war-film genre in which remarkable contrast that this film provides to individual heroism and the struggle to survive is Bekmambetov’s other major project of the foregrounded against a fractious collective of 1990s: his ground-breaking series of television soldiers who among themselves are also both ad spots for Imperial Bank. Bekmambetov (like victims and victimizers. While the film paints many of his fellow filmmakers) deliberately governments with a broad and negative brush, shifted his focus from cinema to television in the national stereotypes are eschewed in the film in 1990s specifically to find the audience that no favor of personal portraits. Whether English, longer went to the movies. While his private French, Soviet, Afghan, or American, people are (because seen by no one) verdict on the Soviet not marked by national color but by personal apotheosis suggests that the imperial project is a credos and fidelity to duty. Ultimately, the nightmare fit only for oblivion, the message that soldier’s duty to kill and the doctor’s he projected through the most democratic Hippocratic Oath are equally validated and then medium suggests a dream world of beauty, rendered equally absurd as the action drives nobility, and discipline that can exist only in toward its tragic end. fantasy. Who decides whether this fantasy is The modality of absurdity characterizing oriented toward the past, or toward the future? Bekmambetov’s 1994 film yields to a forced coherence in the 2002 reedited release. The Gerald McCausland British journalist Charlie Palmer becomes the American journalist Charlie Palmer, but even Timur Bekmambetov was born in 1960 in more important as his new nationality is his Kazakhstan. After completing a course of study larger narrative role. Palmer’s voice (Kushner’s at the Uzbek Theater and Art Institute in 1987, Liverpool accent is dubbed throughout with an Bekmambetov moved to Moscow. His first American voiceover) becomes a behind-the- film, The Peshawar Waltz, remained his only scenes, first-person but all-knowing narrator, film for many years as he worked almost ruminating with somewhat vapid philosophical exclusively in television advertising. His career pretention on the tragedy and ubiquity of as one of Russia’s most successful film directors violence and war. The struggle of the Soviet began with the release of Night Watch in 2004. POWs also undergoes a shift—under the almost Bekmambetov has continued his successful anthropological gaze of the American journalist, career in both Russia and Hollywood as a their behavior, their speech, and their aggression director, screenwriter, and film producer. becomes exotic and strange. Less than a year after the Al-Qaeda terror attacks in the United Filmography (as director): States, Escape from Afghanistan has modified the earlier sense of absurdity and despair into 2012 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter one of grim but purposeful determination. As a (USA) result, Palmer’s final shocking act becomes, if 2010 Six Degrees of Celebration not less powerful, then certainly more weakly 2008 Wanted motivated. 2007 The Irony of Fate 2 Thus the two versions of the film 2005 Day Watch respond to the tenor of their times. While the 2004 Night Watch American version of the film responded to the 1994 The Peshawar Waltz resurgence of aggressive patriotism in the United States after the terrorist attacks, Bekmambetov’s film revisits a painful episode in the life of the country not to glorify it and certainly not to establish the historical truth. The desolation at the end of the film invites its viewers to forget a history that cannot be made sensible or integrated into post-Soviet Russia’s own story. It remains only to wonder at the .