Jeffrey Skoller, associate professor of film and media, is the author of Shadows, Specters, Shards Making History in Avant-Garde Film

“This passionate, multifaceted look at the continuing American involvements in (and denials about) Afghanistan takes us many places where other filmmakers and spectators fear to go, inside and outside that country, showing us the profound connections between what we do and what we choose to ignore.”-Jonathan Rosenbaum

As the war in Afghanistan approached the ten-year mark, John Gianvito invited four politically committed filmmakers to join him in creating an omnibus film focusing on the war's impact both in Afghanistan and in the United States, inspired by the 1967 French antiwar film Far from Vietnam. The artists' diverse responses take the form of fiction, documentary, and formal experimentation, and make crucial connections with history and the social reality of the present. Interwoven between the five shorts are images of present-day Afghanistan created by Afghan Voices, a collective of young Afghan media journalists.