The Land of the Enlightened review: spectacularly lost in Afghanistan

This ambitious Belgium-Ireland-Netherlands-Germany co-production attempts to sculpt a Robert J Flaherty-style ethnograph from stunning documentary images from Afghanistan. Making his directorial debut, Pieter-Jan De Pue, a Belgian photographer for the Red Cross, spent seven years among the children and soldiers who, in The Land of the Enlightened, play fictionalised versions of themselves.

Possessing the kind of survivalist chops that make Bear Grylls look like Teddy Bear Grylls, the kids live at a former Soviet outpost in the Pamir Mountains, where they slaughter sheep for sustenance, smuggle arms, rob strangers, and play among ancient munitions.

Gholam Nasir, the gang’s self-styled leader, hopes to one day marry his childhood sweetheart with profits from stolen opium and cross-border operations. He is a young teenager; she is still of a single digit age.

Elsewhere, a group of American soldiers strum guitars, lift weights and occasionally blow up sections of mountain as they prepare to hand over operations to native soldiers. Their attempts at reaching out to locals are met with stony-faced silence but the brass left behind from their shoots is greatly appreciated by Afghanistan recruits, who trade it for bread.

These various narrative strands compete against each other. Some scenes – notably a tangential visit to a lapis lazuli mine – feel entirely random. A strange, poetic voiceover by Sohrab Nazari does little or nothing to bring order to the images we’re seeing. The sections featuring the children feel distractingly staged. The sections featuring the military look like a different film altogether.

De Pue's 16mm cinematography remains impressive. But watching his various time-lapse landscapes, one can't help but wish that the entire movie was similarly condensed. For all its narrative clutter, The Land of the Enlightened is characterised by a great deal of downtime and pointless, pretty pillow shots.

It’s remarkable that the film was made at all. If only it had been made a little better.