Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi at the TFF

Ajmal Naqshbandi, above, was beheaded by the Taliban in 2007. Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi tells his story using Taliban recruitment videos, Russian music videos, clips from Italian and other countries' news programs, and footage filmmaker Ian Olds shot before Naqshbandi was kidnapped and killed.

Olds originally wanted to make a movie about fixers, people who help foreign journalists find sources and navigate the culture and territory, usually in wartime situations. But during the course of filming Naqshbandi helping Christian Parenti, journalist for The Nation, Naqshbandi was captured along with a driver and an Italian journalist. Italy was able to pressure the Afghan government into trading prisoners for the Italian captive, but Afghanistan refused to budge on the demands for Naqshbandi, letting him die at the hands of the Taliban.

The film is moving, horrifying, occasionally funny, and wholeheartedly fascinating. It reveals an aspect of the news business that is discussed in inverse proportion to its importance, and it shows how Naqshbandi's story embodies many of the complexities and compromises of contemporary life in Afghanistan. We felt privileged to see it.

Adding to that reaction was the terrific panel after the Tribeca Film Festival screening, which included Olds, Parenti, New Yorker writer George Packer, Bob Dietz of the Committe to Protect Journalists, and Naqeeb Sherzad, a former fixer and close friend of Naqshbandi's who also appears in the movie. The conversation --- which ranged from ruminations on the ethics of hostage negotiation to discussions about the inaccessibility of Afghan women to male journalists --- was thoughtful and absorbing. But as interesting as these big-picture issues were, the conversation kept pulling itself back to Ajmal (as everyone called him), which was, Olds said, exactly his point: the stories of history and the stories of individuals are always and everywhere colliding.

Photo: thanks