Near-silent and shot via a cell phone, a war veteran observes the world which has been colored by his experiences in Afghanistan.

Cyrus Frisch has been called the 'enfant terrible' of Dutch filmmaking. In Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan, Frisch stars as the protagonist of his own movie, playing an emotionally withdrawn veteran of the war in Afghanistan who observes the world in increasing isolation from the window of his apartment in Amsterdam, and from disembodied angles as he wanders the streets of the city. His eye is instinctively drawn to the escalating harassment of the immigrant population by the police. Throughout the film, Frisch highlights the global loss of multicultural understanding in discomfiting fashion. His filmmaking style is nothing less than bravura. Shooting entirely through a cell phone, he constructs an essentially dialogue-free, improvisational narrative. The protagonist's isolation from his surroundings is underscored by bars on his apartment's windows that frame the immigrants on the outside, who are themselves imprisoned in an increasingly alien culture. At other moments, Frisch turns the camera on himself, his mind's eye reflecting back to violent flashes of war. Throughout the film, figurative images of people in the street below, the play of light on the water of the canals, shots of buildings against the setting sun and scenes of people in landscapes tend to break up into digital pixels, and blur and bleed into blotches of vivid, colorful abstraction. An experimental narrative par-extraordinaire, this film is reminiscent of Jennifer Reeves' The Time We Killed (Tribeca Film Festival 2004), an avant-garde feature film detailing the disturbing effects of September 11 on the psyche of the main protagonist.—Jon Gartenberg

Told through the eyes of a traumatized Dutch soldier who has returned home from a tour of Afghanistan, Why didn't anybody. . . documents the brewing tensions between native Dutch citizenry, immigrant youth and the police in a small square in the heart of Amsterdam. In this decidedly experimental work, shot almost entirely with a cell phone video camera, these tensions are made palpable through a process of accumulation. Scene after scene of youths gathering, police detentions and aimless protests are lensed from a claustrophobic, subjective viewpoint. The film also happens to be the first feature-length work shot on a cell phone to screen at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, making it the first such work to premiere at any international festival of prestige worldwide. In itself, this represents a major accomplishment, but more importantly it recharges the first-person narrative with startling intensity. Director Cyrus Frisch uses the qualities of the cell phone-its degraded video quality, its mobility, its unique cultural standing as both a public and private tool for communication-to imbue his film with themes of intense subjectivity, alienated paranoia and the immediacy of documentary. Frisch notes, "There is a lot of fear about war, the environment and the economy, and this is projected onto something smaller that we can cope with, like immigrant kids in our streets. But, at the end of the day, I think it is understandable and even healthy that we feel insecure about our future."—Sean Uyehara