POV: Armadillo

In 2009, Janus Metz and cameraman Lars Skree accompanied a platoon of Danish soldiers to Armadillo, a combat operations base in southern Afghanistan. For six months, often while under fire, they captured the lives of the young soldiers fighting the Taliban in a hostile and confusing environment, where official rhetoric about helping civilians too often met the unforgiving reality of being a foreign occupier. Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prix at Cannes, “Armadillo” is one of the most dramatic and candid accounts of combat to come out of Afghanistan.

"Armadillo" sticks close to the soldiers, as jarringly captured in repeated scrambles for cover by Metz and Skree under audible fire. The film faithfully renders the soldiers’ point of view but, in true vérité fashion, neither approves nor condemns what happens, allowing the ambiguities and contradictions of the battlefield — and the soldiers’ evolving attitudes — to speak for themselves.

What is clear is that the soldiers find a harsher climate and geography than anyone anticipated, and an enemy more determined and skilled than anyone told them to expect.

“With Armadillo, I was curious to explore how the micro level of war — where human interaction takes place — affects one of the greatest conflicts of our time,” says director Janus Metz. “I’ve always been interested in making films about people who go through life-altering experiences. This film involves a rite of passage where the men are ultimately faced with themselves and their own humanity — it is universal and basic. In the context of war and the young men who are fighting, I was interested in finding out how the perception of masculinity — the good, the bad, the civilized and the barbaric — is reflected in action and how these concepts are adapted in this coming-of-age story.”

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