Our War – the Power of Collaboration
In April 2010 I was asked to develop a series exploring the experiences of British soldiers serving in Afghanistan. I’d worked with the military before and my initial task was to produce the taster that got the series commissioned.
With Our War we were trying to capture something that hadn’t been seen before - the reality of life on the frontline in Afghanistan, through the soldiers’ eyes. We were aware that troops were taking digital cameras with them to capture events on tour – not just for themselves, but also for their friends and families. Some of the videos had been posted on YouTube and, seeing these, we figured there could be more material among the countless units that had served in Afghanistan. Our idea was to see if we could tell the soldiers’ stories through the footage they’d filmed. The question was how could we start to access the rest of it?
Persuading the MOD that they should allow us to begin our research required months of careful negotiation, but eventually they granted us unprecedented access to the video material and permission to talk to the soldiers about their experiences. This is when the hard work started. We wanted to tell the story of the first ten years of the war in Afghanistan in a way that was raw, unmediated and visceral, but we still didn’t know for sure that the footage existed to make it happen.
Our first success came when I met Sergeant Simon Panter from 1 Royal Anglian. Remarkably he had filmed his entire 2007 tour. As we sat in his living room, he took me through material that was at times tough to watch, funny and deeply moving. He explained everything I was seeing in detail and, as I drove back to the office (with 500GB of material next to me) I knew there was the potential to produce an incredible story.
We began to build relationships with regiments, battalions and individual soldiers across the country, explaining to them what we hoped to achieve with the series. This was their world and we were determined to make sure they were part of the process and felt some ownership over it - we wanted to put the ordinary soldier at the heart of the series.
After a painstaking trawl we had gathered thousands of hours of footage from throughout the conflict, covering everything from the banal to the horrifying. Finding the right framework to make sense of it was challenging. None of it had been shot for broadcast, as it was only ever intended to be seen by fellow soldiers and friends. It needed to be carefully produced to place it in context, explain it and make it watchable. Once again our relationships with the soldiers were vital, as in many cases only they could decipher what was happening in the raw material.
We felt strongly that the interviews should lend weight to the testimonies of soldiers. Direct, portrait shots, enhanced with the use of prime lenses allowed them to speak straight to the viewer and enhanced the deeply personal nature of their insights.
We could never have imagined the reaction that the series received on being broadcast, but always hoped to take the viewer deeper into the experience of war than ever before, giving them a profound insight to the ebb and flow of conflict and its personal cost.
- Our War (Bruce Goodison, John Douglas, Stuart Bernard for BBC Productions; first shown: BBC Three) is nominated for Best Documentary Series at Grierson 2012: The British Documentary Awards