Summary
While this tale doesn’t always hit the right pace, it’s still a powerful story of redemption backed by an impressive backdrop, and shot under difficult circumstances.
It’s been over a decade since director Benjamin Gilmour wowed audiences with Son of a Lion, and the story of making JIRGA is worth a feature of its own. After Pakistani authorities denied permission to shoot in their country, Gilmour decided to go one step further and shoot guerilla-style in Afghanistan.
Following the accidental killing of an unarmed man in an Afghani village, Australian soldier Mike (Sam Smith) returns to the country to find the family of the deceased. Mike makes the journey across the war-torn landscape to place himself in the hands of the Jirga, an Afghan court of tribal elders.
Effectively a play on a familiar atoner trope, Gilmour’s respect for the people and their culture differentiates JIRGA from most wartime forgiveness narratives. He is abducted by the Taliban at one point, but even here the filmmaker doesn’t fall back on villainy and regional riffs as shorthands for ‘the other.’ Instead, his avatar of Wheeler engages in conversation, finding some level of mutual respect.
The emotional weight of the film falls to relative unknown Sam Smith, who has mostly been seen in a handful of shorts, TV movies, and episodes of Home and Away. In some ways, this lack of screen time works to his advantage, believably fitting in as a strange soldier in a strange land. However, given that much of the story is built around him alone, his stoic range doesn’t always convey the appropriate amount of subtext needed for a character piece such as this. Sher Alam Miskeen Ustad, who also appeared in Son of a Lion, is memorable as Mike’s taxi driver, although his fate is ultimately ambiguous.
For a film that was infamously shot on a cheap camera purchased in a Pakistani store, there’s some gorgeous shots from Gilmour in here. Perhaps it is the cinematically exotic locale of Afghanistan, but everything seems magnified and alien. Gilmour manages to convey the vastness of the landscape with a documentarian’s eye. There’s one scene in particular (pictured above) where the unnaturally pristine blue water and sky is contrasted again the unforgiving desert. Mike and his driver traverse this in a giant pink swan, a bit of levity outside the weightier politics.
The film doesn’t quite get the pacing right, which is probably the result of a hastily edited script and the circumstances surrounding the shoot. Yet even though the story doesn’t result in the kind of happy ending we’ve come to expect, it’s nevertheless a film that tells us there is more value in forgiveness than revenge.
2018 | Australia | DIRECTOR: Benjamin Gilmour | WRITERS: Benjamin Gilmour | CAST: Sam Smith, Sher Alam Miskeen Ustad, Amir Shah Talash | DISTRIBUTOR: Sydney Film Festival, Footprint Films (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 78 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 8 June 2018 (SFF)
