Afghanistan on screen in 2008: Opium War, Iron Man and two very different wars

By 2008 the war in Afghanistan was in its seventh year. Newspapers covered it every day, yet cinema had said surprisingly little about it. That year, almost by coincidence, two very different films made the country their starting point. In May, Marvel Studios released Iron Man, directed by Jon Favreau. In October, Siddiq Barmak, the Afghan director of the Golden Globe winner Osama, premiered Opium War at the Rome Film Festival.

Both films begin in the same place: Americans in uniform, a desert, a crash or an ambush, and the sudden loss of control. What each film does next says a great deal about who was telling the story of Afghanistan, and for whom.

The two films at a glance

Iron Man's Afghanistan: a cave, a convoy and a quick escape

Iron Man opens with a caption placing the action in Kunar Province. Tony Stark, the head of a weapons company, has just demonstrated his new Jericho missile to the US military. On the way back his convoy is ambushed, his escort is killed and Stark wakes up in a cave, held by an armed group called the Ten Rings. They want him to build the Jericho for them.

Instead, with the help of a fellow prisoner named Yinsen, a doctor from a village called Gulmira, Stark builds a crude armored suit from scrap and missile parts and fights his way out. Yinsen dies during the escape. Back home, Stark stops making weapons, builds a better suit and later flies back to Gulmira, where he drives the Ten Rings out of the village in a single sequence.

The Afghan setting was a modern update. In the original comic book from 1963, Stark was captured in Vietnam. Favreau moved the story to Afghanistan because he did not want to make a period piece, and the war of the moment was the obvious choice. The film was also made with the cooperation of the US Department of Defense, which supplied uniforms, aircraft and helicopters for the production.

The Afghanistan of Iron Man was, however, entirely Californian. The ambush on the convoy was filmed along Movie Road in Lone Pine, in the Alabama Hills where Hollywood had shot westerns for decades, and the wider desert scenes were filmed at the Olancha Sand Dunes. Gulmira was built for the camera. The Ten Rings are a multinational band of fighters with no clear politics, and the Afghans in the film are mostly captors or victims waiting to be saved.

Opium War's Afghanistan: poppies, a tank and nowhere to go

Opium War starts with a similar image and goes in the opposite direction. A US helicopter comes down in the desert. Two soldiers survive: a white officer and the Black soldier who serves as his aide. They are not heroes. Writing in Qantara.de, the critic Martin Gerner described them as helpless victims, men who use their rifles as telescopes rather than as weapons.

Nearby lives a poor family of poppy farmers who have made their home in a hole beneath an abandoned Soviet tank, a rusting reminder of the last foreign army to fight in Afghanistan. The wrecked helicopter soon becomes spare housing for them. Armed men whose loyalties are never made clear pressure the father to marry off his daughter. In one of the film's sharpest scenes, a woman gives birth during an election and the newborn is laid in a ballot box, a comment on the democracy that outsiders had promised the country. Soldiers and villagers alike take opium to dull the pain.

Barmak shot the film in Afghanistan, and the conditions were as hard as the story. He needed government permission to grow a real field of opium poppies, since the crop had been illegal since 2002, and the shoot also needed the approval of the international security force, ISAF. Poppy eradication teams tried twice to destroy the set. With no water on location, the crew dug wells and brought tankers from about 30 kilometers away.

“But this film is not only about the war in Afghanistan. I'm trying to show that war in general is a tragedy.”

Two very different wars

The two films share a premise and almost nothing else. The differences are worth spelling out.

• Who has power. In Iron Man one American escapes by his own genius and returns to settle the conflict himself. In Opium War the Americans cannot even find their way back to base, and nobody, foreign or Afghan, is in control.
• Who the Afghans are. Hollywood's Afghans are extras in someone else's origin story. Barmak's are the center of the film, with debts, arranged marriages, harvests and dark jokes of their own. The cast includes Marina Golbahari, the young star of Osama.
• What the war is about. Iron Man turns the war into a story about an arms dealer's conscience. Opium War looks at the economy that actually ran through the Afghan countryside: poppies, debt, and buyers abroad. “If the West condemns the growing of poppy, it also has to stop buying the drug,” Barmak told Qantara.de.
• How it ends. Stark gets a new suit and a new mission. The family in Opium War is still living under the tank.

Neither film is a documentary, and both use exaggeration. Iron Man uses it to thrill. Barmak uses it, in Gerner's words, to unmask Afghan reality mercilessly yet imaginatively, even if not every scene lands.

Hollywood's Afghanistan was usually somewhere else

Iron Man was not unusual in building Afghanistan elsewhere. The Kite Runner, released at the end of 2007 and set largely in Kabul, was filmed in Kashgar in western China. For foreign productions, Afghanistan in those years was a setting to be recreated, not a place to work.

That is what makes Opium War, like Osama before it, historically important. After the Taliban banned filmmaking between 1996 and 2001, Barmak's films were part of the effort to make Afghan cinema in Afghanistan again, with local crews, local actors and local landscapes. The history of Afghan cinema is full of films that survived against the odds; Opium War belongs to the short period after 2001 when that seemed possible.

Where the two films met: the 81st Academy Awards

The two films did cross paths once. At the 81st Academy Awards, held in February 2009, Iron Man was nominated for Best Sound Editing and Best Visual Effects. The same season, Opium War was Afghanistan's official submission for Best Foreign Language Film. It did not make the shortlist, but for a country whose film industry had been shut down only seven years earlier, simply entering was a statement.

What came next

The two films then went in very different directions. Iron Man earned more than 585 million dollars worldwide and became the first chapter of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the largest film franchise of its era. In 2022 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. The series is still growing in 2026, with new films and series every year; readers who want to follow it film by film can use this Polish guide to Marvel films.

Opium War won the Golden Marc'Aurelio critics' award for best film in Rome, was scheduled for European release in 2009 and continued to travel the festival circuit, including Films from the South in Oslo in 2010. It remains one of the few fiction films about the international war in Afghanistan made by an Afghan director on Afghan soil, and it is worth watching next to Iron Man precisely because the two films disagree about almost everything.

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