Armadillo is a Danish documentary film about a Danish platoon’s experiences in Afghanistan shot over 6 months.
The documentray won the prestigious Critics Week Grand Prize at The Cannes Film Festival last year. One of the reasons this film is extraordinary is that it doesn’t have a narrator AND it doesn’t even have a single formal sit down interview.
It’s playing on PBS POV on Tuesday night (August 30, 2011) and after that it’s streaming live until september 20, 2011. You can get to the live stream here. Try to watch it. Here’s a review of the film from the Guardian “Armadillo: the Afghanistan war documentary that shocked Denmark”
Synopsis
In 2009, Janus Metz and cameraman Lars Skree accompanied a platoon of Danish soldiers to Armadillo, a combat operations base in southern Afghanistan. For six months, often while under fire, they captured the lives of the young soldiers fighting the Taliban in a hostile and confusing environment, where official rhetoric about helping civilians too often met the unforgiving reality of being a foreign occupier. Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prix at Cannes, Armadillo is one of the most dramatic and candid accounts of combat to come out of Afghanistan. [from the POV website)
