Bangkok 09: Fixer: The Taking Of Ajmal Naqshbandi

Posted on Tuesday September 29, 2009, 04:51 by Sam Toy in Under The Radar

Fixer is my must-see film of this festival. It may well be the best documentary of the year. Ian Olds’ film has already shown in the Rotterdam & Tribeca film festivals, as well as several documentary festivals over the course of 2009, and picked up awards at pretty much all of them. I fully expect it –eligibility permitting - to go on and take the Best Documentary Oscar.

Ajmal Naqshbandi was an Afghan citizen and journalist. He was also a fixer – a local who in wartime works with foreign journalists to arrange and translate meetings/interviews with ‘the enemy’. In this case that was, of course, the Taliban.

In 2007, Ajmal, the Italian journalist for whom Amjal was fixing, and their driver, were kidnapped by soldiers of the Taliban commander they were trying to meet. Accused of spying, they were held for ransom: five Taliban prisoners for Ajmal and the Italian journalist; as if to prove a horrific point, the driver was executed early into their captivity.

With intervention from the highest levels of Italian and Afghan governments, the ransom was met, and both were to be set free. But in a moment of confusion, as the Italian was celebrating his freedom (and the eyes of the media were focused on this), Ajmal was driven back to the Taliban hideout and re-ransomed for two more Taliban prisoners. This time, no assistance was forthcoming. Days later, the deadline expired, and the Taliban crudely beheaded him.

Six months prior to his murder, Ajmal had been working with American journalist Christian Parenti. A cameraman documented much of their time together, and it’s in this footage that Olds tells more than the tragedy of one innocent man meeting his brutal demise. Fixer is about the state of decay in post-9/11 Afghanistan, a country plagued with poverty, corruption and chaos, and where for the locals, fundamentalist rule begins to look appealing. Other threads emerge, often from Amjal’s personal experiences, which expose the failing of a puppet judicial system (Parenti posits it was hastily constructed to look like it works, so that the Americans could move into Iraq). There’s a moment when Palenti doggedly tries to view a trial, which serves as a screaming metaphor for the whole sorry mess.

Scene after scene from Fixer amazed me; not only did Amjal get Parenti an interview with Taliban soldiers, but Parenti films them openly saying that they are funded by Pakistan, which is also where their offices(!) are. Haven’t the American military been trying to get that statement on record for the best part of a decade?

Other threads about the nation’s ever-crumbling ordnance emerge, mostly told from Amjal’s personal experience. The biggest of course, is his death, exposing a horrible double standard about the value of life in this political football of a country, like a horrific modernisation of The Third Man.

Like Burma VJ: Reporting From A Closed Country, which is also running in this festival (it has already screened in the UK), Fixer is fucking powerful stuff. Yes, there are times when it gets heavy. Really heavy. I’ve not seen footage this graphic in a documentary since Shake Hands With The Devil, and even with a large black box on screen mercifully sparing us the worst of it, Taliban beheadings are particularly brutal. But that’s not to say that it shouldn’t be seen; au contraire - Fixer is the kind of movie that demands to be seen. It’s a movie that packs enough ‘did I just see that/did he just say that?’ scenes to leave you punch-drunk, and it certainly re-evaluates the question of "should we stay or should we go?". It probably only needs to be seen the once, but I’ll be going again today, just to make sure.