Restrepo--The Afghan war in the Korengal Valley

Independent:

An exploding roadside bomb sends panic through a routine patrol. A handsome and popular soldier is shot dead in a volley of gunfire. His friend collapses in sobs on hearing the news, and comrades restrain him from rushing to the body. Later, smoking and joking, half-naked tattooed soldiers casually fire rounds of ammo into a dry Afghan valley. They dance and embrace to the Sam Fox classic "Touch Me (I Want Your Body)". No wonder they're calling Restrepo one of the best portrayals of war ever.

It is released in British cinemas this weekend, but the critics have already given it the thumbs up: it scooped the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, and is being tipped to win best documentary at next year's Oscars. It is Film of the Week in the latest London issue of Time Out, and on the BBC's Kermode and Mayo Film Review show, and has scored an unusually high 97 per cent positive rating on RottenTomatoes.com, considered a barometer for critical opinion.

The film's haunting depiction of life – and death – on the front line brings something new to a century of war and cinema. The difference is that this is fact, not fiction. No script. No acting. No props. Real blood, real bodies. Until the end you don't know which soldiers survive. It is not an easy film to watch, much less forget.

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The US military began withdrawing from the Korengal Valley late last year, having lost nearly 50 lives there, and, according to Hetherington, senior military figures have privately expressed alarm at the film's frank portrayal of a soldier's lot: "When the military saw the film, I got the impression they were surprised by the amount of access that we had. It has certainly raised eyebrows within the US military establishment."

In an early scene, with echoes of the Vietnam classic Apocalypse Now, a platoon is dropped into Afghanistan by helicopter, their nervous faces cut with shots of the valley below. The sense of foreboding is summed up by one soldier, who said: "I thought, holy shit, we're not ready for this."

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A former photographer for The Independent, he describes himself as a liberal journalist, but is at pains to stress the film's neutrality. Indeed, he makes the point that, since the 2001 invasion, there have been fewer civilian casualties in Afghanistan than in each of the two preceding decades. "According to Human Rights Watch, there have been 19,000 civilian casualties since 2001, and the uppermost estimate is 30,000. That's an awful lot of innocent people killed. But that's nothing compared to the 400,000 who died in the 1990s when the Afghan warlords and the Taliban fought it out. And it's nothing compared to the decade previously, when over a million people died."

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This last quoted paragraph puts a real perspective on the issue of civilian casualties in this war. It is one that has been largely ignored by the media. I know I have been following stories about this conflict for over nine years and this is the first time I recall seeing the numbers.

War can be a grinding experience and this film apparently catches that grind on the troops. I think it probably makes the case for shorter deployments.

I think it is also important to know that it was probably a mistake to send a force into the Korengal Valley with too few troops and an inadequate force to space ratio.