Tell Spring Not to Come This Year

There’s a haunt­ing sequence in Saeed Taji Farouky and Michael McEvoy’s Tell Spring Not to Come This Year in which a rag-tag squad of Afghan peace keep­ers – many of whom are there through Nation­al Ser­vice require­ments – hap­pen across an aban­doned fortress. Upon enter­ing, they dis­cov­er that it was once inhab­it­ed by their Amer­i­can sav­iours, who have since upped sticks and left and have even tak­en the inter­nal wiring with them. What has been left behind – pos­si­bly strate­gi­cal­ly? – is a paper­back book detail­ing George W Bush’s tri­umphant incur­sions into the Mid­dle East, and a white­board con­tain­ing a bub­ble chart with ​“9÷11” as its nucleus.

The film is about life after lib­er­a­tion, in which local sol­diers prowl the deserts in search of Tal­iban insur­gents and attempt to exert pow­er and influ­ence over them. It presents the oft-cov­ered top­ic of war’s ulti­mate futil­i­ty in an intrigu­ing new light, in that most are so numbed by bru­tal­i­ty and force, that they just cheer­i­ly suc­cumb to whatever’s met­ed out upon them. No amount of harsh words or vio­lent threat can seem to break through – the ​“ene­my” don’t have orders, they have a creed which they live by, mak­ing it near-impos­si­ble to make divi­sions between friends and ene­mies. Even though the cam­era crew are embed­ded with the local Afghan forces, there’s no sense they are polit­i­cal­ly par­ti­san to their aims, focus­ing instead on the para­dox­i­cal absur­di­ty of the task at hand.

In between the tense, bad­ly organ­ised, trig­ger-hap­py sor­ties, we see footage of the sol­diers in the bar­racks, rolling their eyes and smil­ing at the futil­i­ty of it all: per­haps they don’t realise that sud­den death could very eas­i­ly befall them in the com­ing days? Maybe they know and don’t care any more?