The Kill Team

In 2010 the soldiers of an American infantry platoon serving in Afghanistan were accused of killing civilians for sport and staging the scenes to look like combat. The press gave the group the name Kill Team. Adam Winfield was inside that platoon and had told his father what was happening; the father tried to pass it to the Army and nobody acted. In the end Adam was among those charged. Dan Krauss's documentary films four of the accused and the Winfield family before the trials. The soldiers speak for themselves, and what they say is not a defence but a description: how it started, who started it, and what objecting means inside a platoon. The film exonerates nobody, but it does not settle for laying the blame on individuals either; what it asks is how this became possible inside a unit and why the report never travelled upward. Seventy-nine minutes.