Restrepo

A platoon of American soldiers spends fifteen months at a fifteen-man observation post in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. They built the post themselves and named it after Juan Restrepo, their medic, who was killed. The film stays inside those fifteen months: the sound of digging, daily contact, meetings with village elders, losing a friend. There is no narrator, no expert, no political commentary. Not one sentence is offered on whether the war was justified, and that is a choice rather than an evasion: the film records what the men there went through, not what it was for. The interviews were shot in Italy after the rotation ended, and those faces are far harder to watch than the ones at the outpost. Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger directed. Both are journalists, Hetherington a photographer and Junger a writer. It won the documentary grand jury prize at Sundance in 2010 and was nominated for an Academy Award. A year later, in April 2011, Hetherington was killed by shrapnel while covering the Libyan civil war. Junger cut a second film, Korengal, from the leftover footage in 2014. Who it is for: anyone who likes front-line documentaries and observational cinema without comment. Who it is not for: anyone who wants context. The Afghan side is barely heard, and the film makes no attempt to make up for it.