Armadillo

Armadillo premiered in Critics' Week at Cannes in 2010 and won the section's Grand Prize, a rare result for a documentary. It was Janus Metz's first feature-length film for cinema; he had previously made television documentaries with the anthropologist Sine Plambech. At home it won both Danish critics' and academy prizes for Best Documentary, the Bodil and the Robert, and in the US it later won the News & Documentary Emmy for editing.

In 2009 Metz and cinematographer Lars Skree followed a platoon of Danish soldiers on a six-month deployment to Forward Operating Base Armadillo in Helmand Province. Most of the young men have never fought before. The film records the whole routine: patrols through farmland, video games and horseplay in the downtime, phone calls home, and firefights at close quarters. Its look is closer to a war film than to reportage — widescreen, carefully graded, with an ominous score — and that choice is what makes it hard to forget.

The same polish made it controversial. Critics asked whether cinematic grading and sound design blurred the line between witness and drama, and in Denmark one firefight prompted a political row and a military investigation, which cleared the soldiers. The novelist Carsten Jensen wrote in Politiken that after Armadillo it would no longer be possible to talk about Afghanistan in the same way. Released the same year as the American Restrepo, it remains one of the defining European documents of that war.