Kabul

Made under the European Alliance — the co-production pool France Télévisions, Rai and ZDF set up in 2018 — Kabul is the most ambitious thing that partnership has produced: a six-part, English-language account of the fall of the Afghan capital in August 2021, shot near Athens and carried by public broadcasters in nine countries. It premiered in the international competition at Series Mania in March 2025.

Olivier Demangel, who wrote Novembre and Anatomy of a Fall, built the script with Thomas Finkielkraut and Joe Lavy around the fictional Nazany family — a prosecutor on a Taliban list, her husband trying to secure French papers, a newly qualified doctor daughter, a son with a checkpoint command and a second job as an informant — and intercuts them with the diplomats, soldiers and intelligence officers running the evacuation. The Polish directors Kasia Adamik and Olga Chajdas keep the register procedural rather than heroic; the ensemble includes Jonathan Zaccaï, Jeanne Goursaud, Valentina Cervi and Eric Dane, in one of his last roles.

The Guardian's Jack Seale gave it four stars and called it a tense, powerful six-parter that captures the slide into terror; the criticism it attracted was that it sometimes simmers where it might strike. What it does better than any film on the subject so far is hold the two scales at once — the family deciding who leaves, and the institutions deciding who is worth a seat.