A prizewinning documentary at Sundance, Restrepo reached SIFF at the same time as co-director Sebastian Junger’s companion book, War. He made two separate May visits to Seattle, speaking before packed houses at Third Place Books and Town Hall, then again at the SIFFQ&As with his co-director, Tim Hetherington, a noted English photographer. When the two men sat down to discuss the film at the W Hotel, Junger (The Perfect Storm) seemed exhausted by the publicity ordeal. Yet both endured worse during the roughly five months they spent, with breaks, among a forward combat company in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley during 2007-08. Hetherington broke an ankle, and Junger tore a hamstring; both wielded small video cameras during moments of intense boredom and intense combat.
Tim Hetherington
Members of Battle Company in a lull between combat.
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Restrepo opens Fri., July 16 at the
Varsity. Not rated. 86 minutes
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Shortly after their doc premiered at Sundance, and before SIFF, U.S. forces withdrew from Korengal Valley, causing the filmmakers—and the men who fought there—to question why troops were deployed there in the first place. If it was so important, Junger asked in an op-ed for The New York Times, why not stay? His movie, and Outpost Restrepo, were named for a Colombian-American immigrant soldier, Juan Restrepo, who was killed in the valley. Was that death, one of several, in vain?
That was the context as we sat down to chat.
“It’s not a political film,” says Junger of Restrepo. “Soldiers don’t think in those terms about he war they’re fighting. They may be the only people in the country who aren’t filtering their understanding of the war through a political lens. What we wanted to do is capture their reality; and that’s not a political reality.”
Yet those same troops are in a curious position, Hetherington adds: “These 18- to 25-year-olds in Afghanistan are on the sharp end of American foreign policy. This country asks a lot of them, not only in terms of putting their lives on the line. But also navigating very complex cultural skills. It’s very difficult for people back home to digest this information, when they haven’t really had an understanding of what exactly are we doing there.”
Both directors return repeatedly to the word “accessible,” wanting to distinguish Restrepo from polemical anti-war docs (e.g. No End in Sight) and fictional treatments, like the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker. They don’t want it to be perceived as anti-military or pro-war, a delicate balance to strike.
“It’s a terribly visceral war film,” says Hetherington of Restrepo, though no deaths are shown directly. (Indeed, try to imagine standing up during a firefight to film a movie.) “At Restrepo, they were the tip of the spear in the Korengal.”
It was important, Junger notes, to gain trust and bond with the soldiers in Battle Company, to neither endorse or oppose the war in Afghanistan. Speaking of the usual divide back home between peaceniks and support-the-troopers, he explains, “I think that he film can bring those two communities together in meaningful way. Rather than journalism being antagonistic with the military. There is a middle ground between propaganda and antagonism.”
But what motivates these soldiers to risk their lives in nearly decade-long conflict that’s so unpopular, and ignored by the media, back home?
Junger looks at the demographics this way: “They’re all 21, 22… so they all enlisted after 9/11. Some enlisted because of 9/11. Some are patriots. Some were interested in experiencing combat and didn’t have a political take on it. Combat is bit of a rite of passage for men, and some of them were drawn to it for that reason. Some had fathers in Vietnam and wanted to carry on that tradition. There was essentially every race in the world. I would say that they were mostly middle-class kid. There was one black guy; there were a lot of Latinos. There were a bunch of kids from suburban white families who I think were out for a little adventure. There was a real cross-section.”
As he explores in his book War, Junger sees in Restrepo an intense male desire for combat and camaraderie. The reenlistment rate is high. He recalls “only one guy” who served a single tour and went home. “They wanna be back there. They’re saying they miss it—the degree of friendship, and the significance that they feel. It gives their lives meaning, as it were, and they miss that.
“I think one of the things that civilians have a really hard times coming to grips with is the idea that, something happens at war that men feel compelled to return to. And it’s confusing to those guys. War is pretty bad. They all lost good friends out there. They all almost died out there. It was physically miserable. It was horrendous. But they all miss it. It’s like missing a really, really bad marriage.”
