DocsBarcelona 2016: Kandahar Journals

Louie Palu, Devin Gallagher. Canada, 2015. Original language, Catalan subtitles. 76'.

This documentary tells the story of photojournalist Louie Palu at the front of the combat in Kandahar, in the south of Afghanistan. Through the diary he wrote between 2006 and 2010, the audience discovers his psychological evolution amid the harshness and tedium of an absurd violence disconnected from reality.

Viewers experience the harshness and tedium of the war as told in the first person, from an unprecedented point of view constructed through Palu’s perception, as he fails to understand the situation around him. The chaos at the firing line is combined with Palu’s banal life in North America, and this strong contrast helps us understand the complex inner world of a war photographer.