Waarom heeft niemand mij verteld dat het zo erg zou worden in Afghanistan (2007)

Cyrus Frisch has been called the “enfant terrible” of Dutch cinema. In Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan?, Frisch plays the protagonist of his own film: an emotionally withdrawn veteran of the war in Afghanistan who watches the world grow increasingly isolated from the window of his apartment in Amsterdam, and from disembodied angles as he wanders the city streets. His gaze is instinctively drawn to the growing harassment of the immigrant population by the police. Throughout the film, Frisch highlights the global loss of multicultural understanding in a disconcerting way. His filmmaking style is nothing short of bravura. Filming entirely with a mobile phone, he constructs an essentially dialogue-free, improvised narrative. The protagonist’s isolation from his surroundings is underscored by the bars on his apartment windows, which frame the immigrants outside, who are in turn imprisoned in an increasingly alien culture. At other moments, Frisch turns the camera on himself, his mind’s eye reflected in violent flashes of war. Throughout the film, figurative images of people on the street below, light playing on the canal water, shots of buildings against the setting sun, and scenes of people in landscapes tend to break up into digital pixels, becoming blurred and fading into vivid, colorful patches of abstraction. Category: 2007 films.