LIAS Film Series: "Hollywoodgate"

Date: Sunday, 19 October 2025, 7 pm
Location: SCALA Programmkino | Apothekenstr. 17 | 21335 Lüneburg

With an introduction by producer Talal Derki (LIAS Public Fellow).

In his film Hollywoodgate, Egyptian director and journalist Ibrahim Nash'at spends a year accompanying two high-ranking Taliban members – Mawlawi Mansour, head of the newly formed air force, and Mukhtar, an ambitious fighter – in the immediate aftermath of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. Hollywoodgate was shortlisted for the 2025 OSCARS not only for its cinematic quality, but above all for its political explosiveness and topicality.
The central location is the abandoned US military base ‘Hollywood Gate’ in Kabul, where the Taliban find billions worth of state-of-the-art weapons. The film documents how an Islamist militia transforms itself into a military-technical regime. It is equipped with Western military hardware and a growing awareness of media self-presentation. Hollywoodgate impressively shows what the Taliban allow in front of the camera and, precisely through what is left out, through staging and silence, reveals deeper structures. With impressive intimacy and without commentary, Nash'at lets his images speak for themselves. They tell of revenge fantasies and the targeted use of propaganda, raising pressing questions about the emergence of new centres of power and the role of media images in authoritarian systems.
The film is highly relevant for understanding a world in geopolitical upheaval and sheds light on our changed perception of war when its actors begin to stage it themselves in the style of Western aesthetics.

Free admission.
2019 | Director: Ibrahim Nash’at | Germany, USA | 91 min.