It’s the kind of sentiment you expect to hear on stage at the Kodak Theater around this time of year: “It’s important to learn from the suffering of other people”. Except this time it’s not coming from the mouth of someone who’s just made an Oscar-winning film, it’s said by one of the war-zone tourists in Vita Maria Drygas’s feature debut Danger Zone. Many people will be aware of the phenomenon of “extreme tourism” or “dark tourism”, which at its mildest end might mean prodding around the locations of infamous crimes. At its wildest, we get the service offered by Rick Sweeney, one of Danger Zone‘s subjects. If you want to send a real postcard from the edge, Rick runs a company that can take you out to an active war zone.
Drygas spent seven years making her film, during which she and Rick had plenty of locations to choose from: Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, as well as several ones that have fallen off the news agenda but remain as dangerous as ever. In its own way, Danger Zone is a piece of war reporting, yet you never get the same heart-in-mouth feeling you get when you watch a film like – say – Matthew Heineman’s City of Ghosts or Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts’s For Sama. This is because, despite the bombed-out cars and artillery flying into the air, the wars remain strangely unreal to Drygas’s protagonists. They talk about the adrenaline rush they feel, but that’s not the same thing as understanding the scale of a crisis. It’s certainly not the same thing as having a stake in these conflicts to match the combatants and civilians they meet.
Every observational documentary must have at least one unforgettable character, and in Danger Zone it’s Andrew. A British man with the look and manner of a missing Goss brother, we see him unpack his travel kit in front of his young daughter, who asks what moisturiser and aftershave are. (You half-expect the scene to end with Slim Pickens from Dr. Strangelove chipping in: “Shoot, a fella could have a good weekend in Vegas with that!”) Bounding out of the plane into Mogadishu, he excitedly notes the bomb-proof walls of the airport, saying “This is what we came for!” You often wonder if these people see themselves as starring in their own movie, a movie noticeably less analytical and detached than the one Drygas has made. Sure enough, after telling a story about hanging out with a tribe of headhunters, Andrew adds “Sounds a bit like Indiana Jones, doesn’t it?” Then, after a pause, “But it is.”
Thought-provoking and often infuriating documentary cinema, gorgeously shot in extremely challenging circumstances by Ahmad Imami, Mateusz Wajda and Mauricio Vidal. Drygas has chosen a laudably risky subject for her debut feature
Except, of course, it isn’t. A.J., one of Rick’s American clients, talks about spending time with “terrorists or freedom fighters”, then ruefully notes that he doesn’t like what his country has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. He seems to be looking for a greater, more empathetic political understanding, and the question of whether this kind of tourism – voyeurism, to many – can ever create that runs underneath the whole film. On this issue, the final fifteen minutes ventures some cautious optimism. Ultimately, it’s hard not to feel like any empathy or awareness these people show could be better channelled into working for an NGO, rather than turning conflict zones into a safari.
This may well be a problem of war-zone tourism, but it’s not a problem with Danger Zone. Drygas’s film is a model of hands-off direct cinema, observing its protagonists at their best and at their worst, then leaving the judgments for the audience. A bigger problem is that Andrew’s wannabe action heroics end up overshadowing the other tourists. Drygas’s camera keeps returning to A.J., and to another client, Eleonora, in Afghanistan, but she never quite gets under their skin in the way she does Andrew and Rick. The film probably wouldn’t have been as good if Andrew was the only tourist under scrutiny, if only because it would invite the question of whether this one man was really emblematic of every war-zone tourist or whether Drygas had just chosen the most outlandish subject. But A.J. and Eleonora don’t make enough of an impression to fully work as counter-examples.
Still, this is troubling, thought-provoking and often infuriating documentary cinema, gorgeously shot in extremely challenging circumstances by Ahmad Imami, Mateusz Wajda and Mauricio Vidal. Drygas has chosen a laudably risky subject for her debut feature and – despite some narrative wobbles – has pretty much closed her fist around it. It will be fascinating to see where she goes next.
Danger Zone (2024) is played Kinoteka Film Festival 2024
