SPOILER ALERT: the following article contains massive spoilers, including the ending. If you have not yet seen the movie, proceed at your own risk, or better, come back to this article later!
What We Left Unfinished tells the incredible and mostly true story of five unfinished feature films from the Communist era in Afghanistan (1978-1991) – when films were weapons, filmmakers became targets, and the dreams of constantly shifting political regimes merged with the stories told onscreen. It is also a story about a tight-knit group of Afghan filmmakers who loved cinema enough to risk their lives for art. Despite government interference, censorship boards, scarce resources, armed opposition, and near-constant threats of arrest and even death, they made films that were subversive and, in the filmmakers’ opinions, always “true” to life. All five films — THE APRIL REVOLUTION (1978), DOWNFALL (1987), THE BLACK DIAMOND (1989), WRONG WAY (1990), and AGENT (1991) – completed principal photography before being canceled by the state or abandoned by the filmmakers. Never edited, they escaped the final censors’ cut. And while all five films are fictional, they each record some aspect of the period. What We Left Unfinished brings together the newly rediscovered and restored footage from these lost films with present-day interviews that reveal the behind-the-scenes stories of the filmmakers (including directors, actors, and crew members who often swapped roles), and new footage shot in the same locations by some of the same directors and cinematographers. Just as the original filmmakers did when they shot action scenes with real bullets, hired ex-agents to play spies, or restaged the Communist coup d’état with the army, air force, and an awful lot of tanks and missiles, What We Left Unfinished interweaves histories and fictions. We call on the filmmakers to explain how their fictions were constructed, how much truth was in these fictions and how true they sometimes became in their making. And ultimately, we come to understand both the price paid by Afghan filmmakers for the benefits they gained under Communism and the reasons they persisted despite the risks they faced – and why they still believe that film could save Afghanistan from the divisions tearing it apart today.
SPOILERS AHEAD
What We Left Unfinished Plot Summary and Synopsis
During the rule of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, the government invested heavily in the film industry, sponsoring many films. Filmmakers were provided with military support too, often using live ammunition and real soldiers on the sets. These films thus also served as propaganda for the regime.
The documentary is a culmination of Ghani’s six years of research at Afghanistan’s National Film Archive in Kabul. Ghani worked to digitise films from the archive and organised multiple screenings of these at museums and universities around the world.
At one such screening, filmmaker Latif Ahmadi learned that the footage of the April 1978 coup in Afghanistan (the Saur Revolution) was from his 1984 film Escape. He then confessed to Ghani that the footage was originally part of his unfinished 1978 film, The April Revolution, commissioned by then Afghan vice-president Hafizullah Amin to commemorate his role in the revolution.
However, the film was not completed as the country was invaded by the Soviet Union in December 1979, leading to Amin’s government being overthrown. Ghani then began to search for the incomplete film and discovered four other films which were forcefully abandoned due to political reasons during the period between 1978 and 1991.
The documentary consists of clips from the films, accompanied by interviews of the directors, the cast and some crew members.
What We Left Unfinished Ending
Ghani intended the documentary to raise awareness about the Communist regime in the country.
She stated that the films only reflected the lives of a small group of elites, who referred to themselves as the “enlightened people”. The Communists are often depicted as “revolutionaries” in these films.
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0).