PARIS – Afghan war film “Armadillo” follows young Danish soldiers deploying against the Taliban for the first time, intimately recording their confrontation with a complicated conflict, the battles, the waiting, the emotions.
It is a film that director Janus Metz said “very consciously tried to break with the sort of news footage realism of Afghanistan to get behind the scenes” of a war that this band of soldiers sees as their generation’s Vietnam.
It blurs the boundaries of documentary and fiction, reaching beyond the small combat unit at forward operating base Armadillo in the deserts of Helmand to a “bigger image of man and war and what war is”. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, winning the Grand Prize of the Critics’ Week, and is doing the rounds of European cinemas, opening in France this week.
It shocked Denmark, Metz told in Paris. “It was really a bomb that went off in the national self consciousness of the Danes that we are out to save the world and we are doing a good thing,” he said. The heroes are Mads, Daniel, Kim and Rasmus, part of a combat unit of about 10 men on a base of around 150 troops that they share with British forces.
Denmark’s contribution to the international military force, in Afghanistan since the Taliban regime fell in 2001, is relatively small — 750 soldiers of a total that has built up to 140,000 from around 40 countries. But by deploying into Helmand, they entered the heart of a conflict that Western military might has yet to tame.
And proportionally Denmark has suffered the heaviest losses in the international force, with 39 Danish soldiers killed since they arrived.
