When the United States withdrew in 2021 from its twenty-year ‘forever war’ in Afghanistan, the Taliban retook control of the ravaged country and immediately found an American base in Kandahar, which they rebrand as Hollywoodgate, loaded with weaponry – a portion of the over $7 billion in US armaments still in the country. With unprecedented access to key Taliban figures, including a high-ranking commander and the head of the military base, director Ibrahim Nash’at’s Hollywoodgate spends a year inside Afghanistan following the Taliban as they take possession of the cache America left behind, observing their transformation from a fundamentalist militia into a heavily armed military regime. The film captures the raw and often startling realities of the power vacuum left behind and the Taliban’s subsequent attempts to establish control.

Notes by David O’Mahony