A version of this story about “Retrograde” first appeared in the Guilds & Critics Awards / Documentaries edition of TheWrap’s Awards Magazine.
When Afghanistan’s government fell to the Taliban in August 2021, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land,” “The First Wave”) was in Kabul, documenting the tragic and violent crisis as it unfolded.
Heineman spoke to TheWrap about his motivation for telling this story, his trusting relationship with an Afghan general, and the anonymous woman who memorably appears in the film’s final shot. “Retrograde” is in select theaters and available to stream on Hulu.
“Retrograde” chronicles the final months of the US engagement in Afghanistan and presents devastating images as the country fell to the Taliban. Was it a movie that had been in the works for a long time?
For me, it started four or five years ago with this somewhat cliché question: “Why do we fight wars?” He wanted to explore that idea through the connections he had with the Army Ranger community. The film rotated several times in the process and we ended up focusing on the Green Berets in Afghanistan and an Afghan general named Sami Sadat. In the end, as the situation changed rapidly, we realized that we were actually making a movie about the end of the longest war in American history.
As the government fell, you were at the Kabul airport, which is the focus of the last third of the film. What was it like to witness that chaos?
It was terrifying. A nightmare. I mean, every one of my movies has taken a lot out of me. But in this one, when we were shooting at the Kabul airport, I was holding the camera and all I could do was concentrate on the shooting process, keeping the camera steady, framing and focusing. That usually calms me down in extremely intense environments.
Did that help you stand your ground on this case?
To some extent, but never in my life, I started crying while filming, all the way to the Kabul airport. I have cried a lot during post-production on my films, in the editing room or after a screening. But I had never experienced the magnitude of desperation that we saw at the airport. I had to keep wiping the tears off my camera lens.
The airport experience is unlike anything I have witnessed in my entire career. Thousands upon thousands of people crammed into a sewage ditch as 18-year-old Marines, who weren’t even alive when the Twin Towers fell, made these impossible Sophie’s Choice decisions about who to let in.
And we see so many children there.
Thousands of children. I mean, just unthinkable. While the Taliban were sitting 100 meters away, guns drawn, watching us. And ISIS-K was hanging around the airport in suicide vests, waiting to attack, which is what happened when they blew up the Abbey Gate 12 hours later, in the same location where we were filming.
He also gained access to a Taliban rally, where one of the leaders declares victory, while blaming the Jewish people for the riot. How did you get that footage?
Well, I’ll backtrack a bit to explain that. It was in August 2021 and we were planning to go back to Afghanistan to spend some time with General Sadat. Experts said it could be six months before the Taliban seized power. But when we got to Dubai, the country was going down pretty fast. We took a flight to Kabul, and as the flight was descending, the pilot got on the intercom and said, “We can’t land because there’s a plane on the runway.” That plane was actually Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fleeing the country in a helicopter. afghanistan had fallen
So the pilot was too scared to land and we went back to Dubai. And I thought it was the biggest journalistic and film failure of my career. We had spent eight months telling this story and now I was sitting in a hotel room in Dubai. So we spent every hour of the day trying to figure out how to sneak back into the country, which we did four or five days later.
At that time, there was a bounty on General Sadat’s head, for which he was forced to flee. We had made the decision to get off the wires at Kabul airport and see what the city was like under the Taliban. We had heard about a Taliban meeting at the Polytechnic Institute. We basically drove to the door and asked if we could film them and they said “Yes.”
Was it that easy?
Yes. Obviously, it was very surreal, having spent my adult life reading about the Taliban and hearing about the Taliban and being shot by the Taliban, to be in that room with them. We started out timidly, in the back of the room, and gradually we got closer, and finally we went up on stage with them.
Your film begins with the voices of the last four US presidents but ends with the face of an Afghan woman. What is the meaning of those bookends?
The beginning represented the dialogue of war during the last two decades. Those four men made decisions from a White House that was far away. But in war, it is ordinary civilians who are most affected. And so I wanted the audience to be left with this image of a woman, who could be anyone’s sister, daughter or mother, at the airport with her hand on the fence. And the camera stays on her face for a long period of time. The faces do not lie. I could have interviewed that woman for three hours and perhaps not have gotten as much information as in that image of her face. She writes a book with her eyes and her body language.
Did you know right away that the image of his face would end the movie?
Not right away. I exaggerate my films a lot, because I love receiving comments, I love being criticized by other filmmakers, journalists, experts or non-experts. And during one of those early screenings, people trashed the ending of the movie. And it really hit me. So I went back to the editing room and stayed up until six in the morning, editing it to the end that you see now. It’s a strange choice, because it’s so non-verbal. But I felt that those images said more than any words that we could put in the film.
But I shot this movie the way I shoot most of my movies. That motive of holding people’s faces was highly contemplated during filming. It was a choice to put yourself down in these situations. My hope is to create an empathic response in the audience. That’s the way, I hope, to build a connection.
Read more from the Guild & Critics/Documentary Awards edition here.
