Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan (2007)

Cyrus Frisch has been called the 'enfant terrible' of Dutch filmmaking. In Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan, Frisch stars as the protagonist of his own movie, playing an emotionally withdrawn veteran of the war in Afghanistan who observes the world in increasing isolation from the window of his apartment in Amsterdam, and from disembodied angles as he wanders the streets of the city. His eye is instinctively drawn to the escalating harassment of the immigrant population by the police. Throughout the film, Frisch highlights the global loss of multicultural understanding in discomfiting fashion. His filmmaking style is nothing less than bravura. Shooting entirely through a cell phone, he constructs an essentially dialogue-free, improvisational narrative. The protagonist's isolation from his surroundings is underscored by bars on his apartment's windows that frame the immigrants on the outside, who are themselves imprisoned in an increasingly alien culture. At other moments, Frisch turns the camera on himself, his mind's eye reflecting back to violent flashes of war. Throughout the film, figurative images of people in the street below, the play of light on the water of the canals, shots of buildings against the setting sun and scenes of people in landscapes tend to break up into digital pixels, and blur and bleed into blotches of vivid, colorful abstraction. An experimental narrative par-extraordinaire, this film is reminiscent of Jennifer Reeves' The Time We Killed (Tribeca Film Festival 2004), an avant-garde feature film detailing the disturbing effects of September 11 on the psyche of the main protagonist.