In his third feature, A War, Tobias Lindholm continues his investigation of how people react under extreme pressure. The stakes are higher than ever as a Danish company commander is forced to choose between his responsibility for his troops, the Afghan locals, his family back in Denmark and the written and unwritten rules of war.

By Freja Dam

Tobias Lindholm’s films exude claustrophobia. What happens to people when they are locked in a closed room and subjected to extreme pressure? How do we interact with each other and resolve conflicts when we have no physical or emotional means of escape?

In R (2010, with Michael Noer) a new inmate, Rune, tries to find his place in the internal hierarchy of a closed prison. In A Hijacking (2012), a ship’s cook, Mikkel, fights to survive on a ship that’s been captured by Somali pirates while shipping company president Peter is in intense negotiations to free the hostages. Now, in A War, company commander Claus finds himself under fire and makes a decision that has consequences for himself, his men, the Afghan locals and his family back home in Denmark.

A War Photo: Per Arnesen

“For the past 14 years, Denmark has been a nation at war. It has defined my generation, more than anything else, that we have sent young men to wars that haven’t been about defending Denmark’s borders but are based on a more abstract political choice,” Tobias Lindholm says about picking the war in Afghanistan as his subject.

“I have always liked American Vietnam War movies and see them as a way for the American society to collectively process a trauma. This film is my stab at processing Denmark’s presence in Iraq and Afghanistan – a process I don’t think has remotely begun. It’s high time that we address what we have sent our men off to in the name of democracy.”

Understanding vs. Condemnation

Unlike Vietnam War movies like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now that lay bare the absurdity of war, Lindholm has no unequivocal political message with A War. The aim isn’t to determine whether the war in Afghanistan was right or wrong but to illuminate the consequences of the war on all its participants. It’s about understanding rather than condemning.

“I want to add some nuances to the debate by defending as many positions as I can, putting myself in other people’s shoes rather than telling the story from my own political standpoint, which is based on things I haven’t personally experienced. I was never in a war, so I thought I’d start out with something my sweet, leftist mother taught me: war is evil, and so people at war are evil, too. I wanted to challenge that inference,” Lindholm says.

In the film, Claus in the heat of battle decides to prioritise his own men’s safety over the safety of the local population. Other scenes show the soldiers treating Afghans roughly and kidding around after they shoot an enemy. It may seem cynical, Lindholm says, but when your life is threatened every day and you watch your buddies die in front of you, your moral tenets change. When you never know where a roadside bomb is buried, or who buried it, it’s only natural to be wary of strangers.

“In the specific dilemma in the film, some have to die so others can live. How the hell do you make a decision like that when bullets are whizzing around your head?”Tobias Lindholm

“Not to say it’s right, only that it’s all too human. And I think that’s the whole job: telling the story so we can identify with these people,” Lindholm says.

“In the specific dilemma in the film, some have to die so others can live. How the hell do you make a decision like that when bullets are whizzing around your head? I’m interested in what being in that kind of situation and having that kind of responsibility does to people. Who are these young men when they are sent off, who are they over there and who have they become when they return home? How do we look at this as objectively as possible without condemning their actions? How do we humanise the inhuman? How can we ever understand their situation?”

Reality Rules

For Lindholm, the road to understanding goes through massive research. When he and Noer made R, they worked with the dogma of “Reality rules.” Both directors have maintained that approach.

“I find real life insanely exciting,” Lindholm says. “For me, it’s interesting to find a slice of reality that I can focus on, make myself a slave to and mix blood with. I don’t organise reality based on what my plot wants but let my plot be dictated by what reality has to offer.”

In the writing phase, Lindholm consulted with Afghanistan vets, relatives of soldiers, an auditor, a defence attorney and a former Taleban warrior he met in Turkey, where the film was shot. He also found Afghan refugees there and cast them for his film.

In the Afghanistan part of the film, only three of the roles are played by professional actors: Pilou Asbæk as Claus, Dar Salim as his second-in-command, Najib, and Dulfi Al-Jaburi as the soldier Lasse. The rest of the unit were played by professional soldiers who have been to Afghanistan. They were key to understanding the logic of the military world down to details like chains of command and radio communications. On the shoot, they showed how soldiers move and act on missions. Plus, they were refreshingly easy to work with.

“A good thing about soldiers is that they are used to taking exercises seriously. An exercise is a kind of acting. It’s the idea of being at war. That’s just like a film production. Also, soldiers have the gift of showing up on time, having their stuff in order and doing as they’re told. Working with kids was far more challenging,” Lindholm says, referring to the scenes of Claus’s wife and three children back home in Denmark which take up a big part of the film.

The Home as a War Zone

R is set in a single arena, a prison. A Hijacking is set in two locations, a ship and the shipping company headquarters. In A War, Lindholm expands into three arenas: the war zone in Afghanistan, Claus’ home in Denmark where he impacts his family by his absence and the courtroom where he has to stand trial as a citizen for the decisions he made during the war.

“I wanted to broaden the scope a bit, both visually and content-wise,” Lindholm says. “A major challenge was expanding the home as an arena: working with a feeling of war in the home and describing the consequences of pulling dad out of the equation and sending him off to face mortal danger. The home part is crucial to the story, because the man who goes off to war isn’t just an empty vessel. He’s someone’s husband, someone’s son and someone’s father. If it was just him, who cares? But it’s not. His life affects a lot of people. A number on the news, how many people have died, can be hard to relate to. But if you picture all the people who are directly affected by just one person being stationed, it’s a whole different story.”

A War Photo: Per Arnesen

In a core scene, an Afghan father asks if his family can spend the night in the camp because the Taleban are going to kill them. Claus turns the family away but tells the man that, as a father of three children himself, he understands his dilemma. “But your children are safe,” the Afghan father protests.

Likewise, you might argue that, however at risk Danish soldiers and their families may be, the Afghans have the short end of the stick. Why not tell their story?

“Things are horrible for Afghans. We touch on their situation by having the encounter with the Afghans trigger a lot of reactions in the film,” Lindholm says. “But I happen to have been born a blond, heterosexual Scandinavian man with blue eyes and no chronic diseases. You couldn’t imagine a more privileged outline of a person. So to imagine me going out and doing a story that satisfactorily accounted for the realities in Afghanistan – it would be arrogant for me to think that I could do that. Living conditions, culture and traditions are so ingrained in people, so I would never be able to achieve sufficient understanding of people whose logic is so different from mine.”

Lindholm the Observer

Watching a Tobias Lindholm film is a bit like looking at bugs in a jam jar: we eye them from above at an angle through the glass, watching them squirm in the small receptacle, but we keep our fingers to ourselves.

“I wouldn’t want to plop down among these people and make demands on their emotions,” he says. “I think it’s much more interesting to create situations where we look at them from outside, because that’s how we live among other people. I will never be you. You exist for me in my encounter with you. It’s like that in films, too.”

Among his inspirations, Lindholm singles out the great Danish documentarian Jørgen Leth, who is famous for his poetic, anthropological studies of people.

“I would always rather say too little than too much.”Tobias Lindholm

“I have learned a lot from Leth’s insistence on observing people without judging them, just letting them stand for what they are and leaving them be. I have to break with that to tell a cohesive story, but I try to avoid judging or romanticising. The best way to do that is by observing what’s going on as soberly as possible.”

There’s no reason to cram the characters’ feelings down the viewer’s throat, Lindholm says. As social beings we are extremely adept at reading other people without anyone having to say anything.

“I would always rather say too little than too much. Some films seem to think that people check their social talent in the cloakroom before they go into the theatre. So they serve up all sorts of unimportant details that take up space and become oppressive instead of giving the viewer room to invest their own experiences and get into the film.”

A War is world premiering in the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti competition. The film is produced by Tomas Radoor and René Ezra for Nordisk Film.

A War in Danish Film Catalogue