It might be too easy to say that “Restrepo” is the “Hurt Locker” of war documentaries, but Tim Hetherington’s and Sebastian Junger’s Afghanistan-set doc certainly has similarities to Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar winner. Both films look at current wars by focusing sharply and relentlessly on the day-to-day lives of the soldiers in combat – in the case of “Restrepo,” on the men of a single platoon in the deadly Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.
“Restrepo,” which is going into its second weekend in theaters, won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary at Sundance and seems likely to show up on the Oscar documentary shortlist when that process begins. This is the first feature film for British photojournalist Hetherington and American journalist (and author of “The Perfect Storm”) Junger, both of whom have both done extensive reporting from war zones around the world.
One of the big issues in documentary films these days is advocacy vs. journalism. "Restrepo" is clearly in the journalism camp.
Junger (at left in photo): Well, we wanted to capture the reality of the soldiers. And soldiers don’t talk about the war politically or morally. They really don’t. I think in Vietnam, with the draft army, there would have been a lot more sitting around talking about the war, saying, “What the hell are we doing here?” But here, there wasn’t. These are all volunteers.
Hetherington: People are angry at us for not advocating some kind of political solution in the film, but I think what they actually want is an anti-war political advocacy, a “stop-the-war, this-is-wrong” kind of thing. Nobody’s going to ask us to advocate that the war should keep going. The advocacy is usually a kind of left-leaning, liberal idea.
Junger: And let me be clear, you’re talking to two left-wing, human-rights reporters.
Hetherington: This is a particular strategy we’re using. This focuses on a group of soldiers, because we understand that the best way to get Americans to focus on what’s happening in Afghanistan is by using the example of their own.
Nowadays, making an independent documentary film is so hard that usually, the usual model is that your film becomes a model for advocacy, so you can enlist that support group and get as much juice out of your film as possible. That’s just practically, financially, what you need to do.
So of course it upsets the balance when suddenly you’ve got guys making a film that isn’t an advocacy film, about a subject that’s so charged.
Some of the complaints have also focused on the film never really addressing the larger issues of the war.
Hetherington: There is a lot of political reporting out there. There’s a deluge of books about Afghanistan, there’s a deluge of reporting out there. What there isn’t is a large, contextualized body of work about the experience of war.
Junger: I’m glad that people are evaluating the war as a whole.
