94 min | R | November 11, 2022 | National Geographic Documentary Films
American Green Berets pack up after twenty years and hand the war to an Afghan general who has no way out. Matthew Heineman keeps the camera at the front while the official story gets written somewhere safer. The betrayal plays out in handshakes.
Matthew Heineman embeds with a unit of US Green Berets and an Afghan general during the final months before the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. The film tracks the handoff as it collapses in real time. American advisors pack their gear while the Taliban advances on the cities they spent twenty years defending. General Sami Sadat inherits a war that his allies have already decided to lose. This is a film about the moment a superpower stops pretending and the people who get left holding the rifle.
Sami Sadat carries the film as himself. He commands troops who are running out of ammunition, air support, and time, and he does it without the luxury of an exit. Heineman catches him on the phone begging American counterparts for help that is not coming. The departing Green Berets register the betrayal on their faces before they say a word. They know the math. They shake hands with men they are condemning and the camera holds on the handshakes longer than comfort allows.
Heineman shoots and directs without a credited writer because the footage builds the argument. The vérité camera stays at chest height in the fighting positions, close enough to record the dirt and the radio chatter and the silence between firefights. There is no narration to soften the access. Heineman cuts from the controlled language of the American briefing rooms to the chaos of the front, and the edit makes the distance between the two feel like a moral fact. The sound design lets the helicopter rotors and the small-arms fire do the work that a score would only cheapen.
The film refuses the official framing of an orderly withdrawal and shows the thing itself. It does not editorialize about policy because it does not need to. The faces of the men left behind make the case. Heineman builds a record of abandonment that holds because it never raises its voice, and the closing images of the airport stay with you because the camera was there when the doors closed.