Armadillo

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[edit] General Information

War Documentary published by PBS broadcasted as part of PBS POV series in 2011 - English narration.

[edit] Cover

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Originally aired on August 30, 2011

In 2009, Janus Metz and cameraman Lars Skree accompanied a platoon of Danish soldiers to Armadillo, a combat operations base in southern Afghanistan. For six months, often while under fire, they captured the lives of the young soldiers fighting the Taliban in a hostile and confusing environment, where official rhetoric about helping civilians too often met the unforgiving reality of being a foreign occupier. Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prix at Cannes, Armadillo is one of the most dramatic and candid accounts of combat to come out of Afghanistan.

Armadillo shows hardened soldiers, who six months earlier had been impressionable youths willing to believe in their mission to help Afghani civilians, but now are conspiring to justify their actions. Who can be sure, after all, that a movement by a wounded Taliban isn’t an attempt to detonate a bomb? And who can be sure that an Afghan isn’t a secret or potential Taliban fighter?

Filmed over six months in 2009, Armadillo takes its name from the forward operating base in Afghanistan’s embattled Helmand province, only half a mile from Taliban positions, where the Danish soldiers were sent in February of that year. Danish and British soldiers are part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which was formed by NATO in response to the U.S. call for support in Afghanistan. But the political mechanism that is sending them to a far-off land to fight appears to matter less to the young soldiers than what they are told is the gist of their mission: to protect the Afghan people and help them rebuild their country.