On its face, The Fixer:
The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi is a story about the death of 24 year
old Afghani Ajmal Naqshbandi. A "fixer" by trade, Naqshbandi made his
living translating, driving and navigating cultural considerations for
foreign journalists as they tried to obtain interviews with Taliban
officials, mullahs and local residents. In early 2007, Naqshbandi and a
team of Italian journalists were double-crossed by Mullah Dadullah, who
kidnapped and held them for weeks while demanding the release of
Dadullah's brother and several other imprisoned Taliban officers.
Unfortunately, the Afghanistan government's priorities were so focused
on avoiding an international incident that when the Italians were
released no one noticed Naqshbandi wasn't among the liberated. His
family went on television, pleading to the better nature of their
fellow Muslims to let their son go, but negotiations broke down and
Naqshbandi was beheaded. The video of his execution sprang up almost
immediately on the internet.
Christian Parenti, a reporter for
The Nation, spent months with Naqshbandi prior to his death. Over the
course of their work together he grew close to the Naqshbandi family,
who are understandably overwrought by his brutal death--yet composed
enough to stand up to their president and demand justice. Director Ian
Olds (Occupation: Dreamland) follows Parenti as he attempts to maneuver
the bureaucracy of justice in a country that is at best slowly
descending into chaos and at worst a criminal enterprise loosely being
held together with good PR and rampant corruption. The scenes where
Parenti attempts to file criminal reports with local police and court
officials are practically lifted from a Christopher Guest film. At one
point Parenti asks to sit in on a murder trial and the Afghan courts
hire actors to play all of the roles of a would-be prosecution.
As
with Werner Herzog's 2005 Grizzly Man, we get to know Naqshbandi via
the wealth of footage shot months prior to this death. Since both Ajmal
Naqshbandi and Grizzly's Timothy Treadwell worked in highly documented
and dangerous fields, pontifications of the many possible circumstances
of their potential demises are readily available. Unlike Treadwell,
whose arrogance, psychological dysfunction and lack of concern for the
safety of the people around him frequently had audiences cheering for
the bears, Naqshbandi comes across as thoughtful, sweet and sadly
precocious in the way young people are when they grow up in war-torn
countries.
Similar to Pamela Yates' The Reckoning, The Fixer
uses its primary subject as a launching pad to pose other, bigger
questions. How can people be expected to form a national identity when
there is no expectation of justice? Without some sense of nationalism,
are these countries doomed to be a playland for violent militias and
religious fundamentalism, forever locking the majority of the
population into endless poverty and constant fear? It's difficult to
watch the story of the charismatic and thoughtful Naqshbandi, who just
weeks before his brutal death still expressed belief in hope and change
for his country. But while the ethereal concepts of hope and change
transformed America's political landscape in 2008, Ajmal Naqshbandi's
life was cruelly extinguished, it's difficult to see a much different
fate for his homeland.
The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal
Naqshbandi screened at Hot Docs 2009, airs on HBO this Monday August
17th and will be available on dvd in November 2009.
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