Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan

Cyrus Frisch has been called the 'enfant terrible' of Dutch filmmaking. In Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan, Frisch stars as the protagonist of his own movie, playing an emotionally withdrawn veteran of the war in Afghanistan who observes the world in increasing isolation from the window of his apartment in Amsterdam, and from disembodied angles as he wanders the streets of the city. His eye is instinctively drawn to the escalating harassment of the immigrant population by the police. Throughout the film, Frisch highlights the global loss of multicultural understanding in discomfiting fashion. His filmmaking style is nothing less than bravura. Shooting entirely through a cell phone, he constructs an essentially dialogue-free, improvisational narrative. The protagonist's isolation from his surroundings is underscored by bars on his apartment's windows that frame the immigrants on the outside, who are themselves imprisoned in an increasingly alien cultur