Tell Spring Not to Come This Year

The award winning Tell Spring Not To Come This Year explores the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan and the lives of the people in the Afghanistan National Army, who continue to fight the Taliban every single day.

What Tell Spring Not to Come This Year does well is painting a very poignant portrait of a country whose people are very lost with no sense of direction. Shot after shot, the film displays the soldiers’ heartache and desperation within the lines of their weary faces. It’s not just the soldiers that the war has taken its toll on. The desolate-but-beautiful landscapes have been taken over by a savage war, captured by directors Saeed Taji Farouky and Michael McEvoy through magnificent cinematography.

But there are times where a great deal of confusion surrounds who is supposed to be the bad guy; one soldier declares “Don’t shoot or the army will shoot us!”, yet up until this point the audience has been under the assumption that the army is the group that are being followed. These many moments of uncertainty make it more of a struggle for viewers to immerse themselves in the piece. Quite often, the documentary begins to slip into conspiracy theory territory, and the overall tone of the piece is very biased towards the western armies, particularly the Americans. One of the most striking sentences uttered is from a soldier at the very beginning who admits boldly to the camera, “They were doing bad things in Afghanistan.” 

It’s possible that the documentary seems “all over the place” in its reflection of the army itself, which seems to have no order and sometimes slips into utter chaos. However, this doesn’t quite work as a cinematic device, because what the audience is left with is a series of disconnected scenes that can fail to capture the attention of the audience. Tell Spring Not to Come This Year is an interesting piece as an exploration of life within the Afghanistan National Army, but it doesn’t really contribute a lot to the wider picture: other documentaries have already beaten them to it, leaving very little in the way of new information.

Verdict: 3 stars

Becky Henrys

Tell Spring Not to Come This Year is released nationwide on 7^th November 2015.

Watch the trailer for Tell Spring Not to Come This Year here: