Restrepo (2010)

Many films have been made about war; this one was shot in the midst of war. Directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington took their cameras to the breathtakingly beautiful and deadly Korangal Valley of remote Afghanistan between May 2007 and July 2008, where they were embedded with the Second Platoon, Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade, on their 15-month deployment. The result is an unsparing (and non-politicized) documentation of war. About 800 meters up the mountainous slopes from their base camp, the Americans built an outpost named Camp Restrepo (after Juan  S. Restrepo who died at the age of 20 in an earlier deployment there). Exactly what the American forces hoped to accomplish there is never at all clear, a point that's accentuated by interviews with the soldiers that are interspersed throughout the film. This ambiguity and futility of their mission is further underscored when at the end of the film we learn that Americans abandoned the post on April 10, 2010. Warning — this film contains graphic images of the violence of war for the Americans, their enemies, and the local civilians.