True/False Films

Secret Screening Red

In person: director

After co-directing a touchstone documentary on a squad of American soldiers deployed in Falluja, this courageous filmmaker renders an even more heartbreaking work. This time, it's a portrait of Ajmal, an Afghan man who before being kidnapped and killed by the Taliban spent his days as translator and guide for foreign journalists. With chillingly intimate access, we watch Ajmal work together with The Nation's Christian Parenti, interviewing members of the Taliban and trading cross-cultural notes. Ajmal is a deeply sympathetic character, a young, intelligent and gifted man whose demise seems to have resulted from a perfect storm involving Afghan corruption, possible Pakistani collusion, and Western indifference. This sobering work is one of the most memorable documents yet from the increasingly amorphous never-ending war. Plays with Germans in the Woods (dir. Tim Rauch, 3 min.) an animated doc, in which a haunted vet lingers on the soldier he killed during WW II. (CB)