“How can you have a war on terror when terror is a tactic?” asks one of the American counter-terrorism analysts interviewed in Greg Barker‘s new film, Manhunt, about the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, which was screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 24 November. Director Greg Barker joined the packed-out audience afterwards for a Q&A via Skype.

Greg Barker joins the Frontline Club audience for a Q&A via Skype from LA after the screening.

In the film, we see Barker conducting interviews with retired CIA analysts and operatives.

“We did ask for some current people inside the intelligence community and they were all denied,” said Barker. “There’s a certain healthy rivalry between analysts and field officers, but I think one of the things that was clear to a lot of people is that since 9/11 there’s been a real effort to integrate them more.”

Many of the analysts interviewed in the film were women who had been examining bin Laden and al-Qaeda since the mid-90s with little recognition from their superiors. One audience member asked whether the women felt that it was a culture of silence or a culture of sexism in the CIA which prevented their work from being recognised earlier.

“I think there was definitely a culture of sexism in the mid-90s,” answered Barker. “But I also know from talking to some people who were not on camera, some of the men involved, even the guys overseeing that unit around 9/11, they all felt that they were crying wolf.”

Indeed what becomes apparent throughout the film is that the threat of bin Laden and al-Qaeda was not taken seriously by many of those working for American national security. As Barker pointed out: “The more they [the analysts] raised the alarm the less they were listened to. . . . At that point, the institutions in Washington were still in a mindset shaped by the Cold War so the idea that a group of fundamentalists somewhere off in Afghanistan could pose an existential threat to America’s national security was just kind of laughable actually.”

The conversation then turned to the topic of ISIS and whether there has been again a failure of the intelligence services to spot the warning signs.

“Our focus now has been shaped by the al-Qaeda threat and the bin Laden threat and that’s just not what ISIS is. There’s always a danger of fighting the last war,” said Barker.

One audience member asked whether a decade-long hunt for one man was viewed by those on the inside as a success or a failure. “There was a certain frustration that it hadn’t been done earlier,” said Barker.

He also spoke of his own frustrations at not being able to include a portion in the film detailing the detrimental effect that the Iraq War had had on the hunt for bin Laden: “It was a massive diversion in terms of resources.”

Barker also spoke about his motivation in making the film. “What I wanted to do was give a human face to the people who work in operations . . . so next time something happens we don’t necessarily believe all the rhetoric and we remember that there are these people inside who in many ways are a lot like us, just doing very unusual jobs.”

Manhunt premiered at The Sundance Festival at 2013 and is available for pre-order from HBO.

The young Harvard-educated economist Miklós Németh didn’t dream he would play a decisive role in the fall of the Berlin Wall when he was appointed Prime Minister by Hungary’s Communist Party to fix the nation’s finances in late 1988. Only a year later he was at the centre of it all.

On Wednesday 5 November, the Frontline Club tuned in to the world premier of 1989, a new documentary by Anders Østergaard detailing the months and days of Németh’s tense political manoeuvring that precipitated demolition of the wall, as it was shown in 57 cities across Europe during the 2014 Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (CPH:DOX).

Stitching together archival footage seamlessly with reenactments of behind-the-scenes political moves, 1989 shows how Németh’s decision to dismantle one of the biggest drains on Hungary’s budget – a 240 kilometre-long electrical fence bordering Austria – reverberated through the former communist block. Just months later, tens of thousands of East Germans were scrambling across the divide.

Post-screening, Németh joined Danish Broadcast Corperation news anchor, Lene Johansen; professor and EU analyst, Lykke Friis; Senior Advisor to the European Policy Centre, Hans Martens; and former Prime Minister of Denmark, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, to reflect on 25 years of changes his decisions brought to Europe.

Continuing Conflict
The continuing conflict between Russia and Ukraine was at the top of the agenda. “I am a great believer in dialogue and compromise. That is the way of finding your way out of a difficult situation,” Németh said of the fighting, adding that his good rapport with Mikhail Gorbachev helped guide him through difficult times.

“Putin is not stupid. I don’t like seeing a comment or an article in the paper that now we’re facing Cold War number two. This is not cold,” Németh said. “Last month Ukraine, Russia, and the EU signed a very important contract on the gas supply. So dialogue, dialogue, dialogue.”

What we’re seeing in Russia is a generation of people who never really accepted what happened in 1989, added Hans Martens. “I think they’re striking back now,” he said. “It’s not just about Ukraine and Crimea, it’s also about trying to reestablish a kind of Soviet Union or at least an empire like that. So dialogue is very good.”

Find out more about 1989 on the film’s website, where director Anders Østergaard will answer questions submitted by audiences from audiences all over Europe participating in this simultaneous screening.

On Friday 2 May, a crowd gathered for a now-familiar Friday set-up of documentary short screenings at the Frontline Club. Wotienke Vermeer, the documentary programmer, introduced the evening’s line up. She explained that this time there was no subject theme for the films but noted instead on the films particular use of sound.

The first film, Hidden Wounds, directed by Tomas Kaan, was unusual in that it was an interactive, music video documentary. The song by Tom Barman, singer of the Belgian band dEUS, was inspired by Jimmie Johnson, a British war veteran who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As  the video explores images of war veterans, Barman sings: “They count the dead now why don’t they just count me.”  Throughout the video the viewer can choose to listen to personal testimonies by clicking on the timeline. Of these, we watched insights from a British World War Two veteran and a Flemish ex-army boxer who fought in the Congo.

From war traumas to an unusual Tibetan celebration, the second film took us to Adam Ruszkowski’s Amdo After Harvest. This documented a disjointed practice of dance, worship, head-scraping rituals and drinking. The colourful dream-like scenes were muted in sound and colour saturation. An agitated and piercing staccatoed string orchestra served as a narration throughout. The sense of chaos created by the music was purposefully overwhelming and disorientating. For a community evidently undergoing cultural changes the film conveys the dichotomy between reality, illusion, suffering and joy effectively.

The audience was also made conscious of the editing of sound and image in the eery film Cathedrals, directed by Konrad Kästner. The opening scene fixes on sky-scrapper apartment blocks, lifeless and looming ominously overhead. This is the ghost-like city of Ordos, in the Chinese province of inner Mongolia. Built to house two million people, it remains empty. Posters promoting its investment potential line the outskirts as a sacrifice to the property vultures and a testimony to greed at any cost. A prophetic voiceover narrates in German a story by Michael Ende. The poetic words juxtaposed with the hollowness of the city created a powerful warning. Together with the title Cathedrals, the narrative affirmed that the empty buildings signify places of worship: the worship of money.

Beach Boy

Beach Boy directed by Emil Langballe offered a welcomed light-hearted portrayal of Juma in Kenya and his dreams of a better life, personified by his relationship with a middle-aged, white, British tourist, with whom he begins a dubious relationship. The audience were made to laugh on numerous occasions throughout as Langballe candidly portrays the characters and their basic needs with a satirical undertone. One scene shows Juma gossiping with his male friends about sleeping with older white women for expensive gifts in return. His friend pipes up admiringly: “Its like fucking the dollar.” The awkward infatuation of a better life at the cost of Juma’s family, his girlfriend and his home offers a fascinating insight into a contemporary African phenomenon.

Tying back into the theme of sound, the film Insein Rhythm, directed by Soe Moe Aung, recreated a sound-scape surrounding a Yangon railway station. Together, the pounding of the ticket stamping, the clapping and levering of the tracks, the fluttering wings of a pigeon trapped inside and the ringing of red telephones created a bold rhythm. These culminated in a climax as the film drew to an end and the train reached the station. Insein Rhythm uses and amplifies sounds present in the scenes portrayed. Amusing to watch, the sound and image is edited, as the name suggests, in perfect unison.

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The final film of the evening, VHS vs Communism, directed by Ilinca Calugareanu, brought to light the mysterious identity of a Romanian woman behind the dubbing of thousands of foreign film illegally distributed on VHS tapes in Romania during the communist 1980s. Her voice is recalled by the film viewers who are interviewed for the documentary. Their light-hearted recollections of the fictitious horror, romance and action films brought smiles to many faces in the audience. The contrast, and thus the threat, that these films represented to communist Romania added to the suspense that lead to the unveiling of the infamous dubber: Irina Margareta Nistor. Fascinatingly Irina explains her motivation in bringing these films to the masses and her satisfaction in undermining government censorship in doing so. The film left the audience with a sense of the power of film in countering mainstream political ideologies.