Standing Up

In 2003, Waise Azimi made a short film Afghanistan After, about the state of Afghan society two years after the fall of the Taliban. Three years later, he returns to the country again and the battle against the Taliban is still not yet over. With his full-length documentary Standing Up, the sociologist and film maker provides a clear yet worrying picture of who the men who are fighting the War Against Terror on the front lines: Afghan refugees and young unemployed men who hope that their voluntary recruitment into the Afghan National Army will give them a head start in a new future.
Waise Azimi embedded himself with his camera for four months in Camp Alamo, a training camp led by American and Canadian and elements of the Coalition forces. He proceeded to follow a group of soldiers from their very first day of training to the last. With a focused eye yet with clear distance, the director follows the young Afghan recruits of battalion 55 and Coalition officers charged with augmenting their training. He doesn’t judge but nor does he shun critical moments and personal intermezzos in his calm reflection, which in all its objective unsentimental nature provides a sharp analysis of a country at war. With it, he has produced an important one-man work.