OK, so I have to make the confession that I have never ever seen anything by Sean Langan before. Ever. Not Tea with the Taleban, not Afghan Ladies Driving School, not Mission Accomplished: Langan in Iraq.
I didn't even manage to see his latest film when it screened on Channel 4 as part of Dispatches.
So I'm probably not best placed to talk about what took place last night at the Frontline Club in London, where Langan showed the second of his two-part series, returning to Afghanistan where a resurgent Taleban are threatening the delicate peace. (In the first part, Langan went undercover with the Taleban.) But I'll talk about it anyway, because it was such a great experience.
Langan's style really seems to work for the sort of film he's making. I'm starting to lose interest in a lot of first-person docs, where it seems the director is far more important than anyone else in the film, but this is different.
I found this from a Sunday Times review of Langan in Iraq in 2004: "Everything that is wrong and reprehensible about Michael Moore is right and admirable about Sean Langan. There is a continuing war in newsrooms about the place of first-person journalism as opposed to third-person reporting. In an ideal and open world, you get both, and this was a great example of how first-hand accounts give you a sense of atmosphere and place that news film, with its lexicon of images that are by their nature staccato and repetitive, doesn’t."
As he sat in the Q&A after the screening, chain-smoking his way through the many questions, he spoke often about the responsibility that journalists have, both in terms of what they're reporting and how they go about gathering it. The rapport that he shared with the British soldiers was obvious, and it was clear that it was important to him that the film respected everyone involved. His principles of fairness went right down to sending himself into enemy territory with the Taleban to find the other point of view. A valuable lesson for filmmakers in a world of increasingly polemical films.