Armadillo

Armadillo (2010) is a war documentary from Janus Metz you can watch online on iFILM. For six months the camera never leaves a unit of Danish soldiers posted to a base in Helmand province, sent there in 2009 to push back the Taliban.

There are no actors and no staged firefights. Young men like Rasmus, Mads and Daniel show up half-eager for action, and within months the road mines, the patrols and the shootouts in the green zone blur the line between duty and hunting another human being. One sequence involving dead fighters set off a public storm back in Denmark and a parliamentary inquiry — that's how close the crew got to what soldiers usually keep quiet about.

It's shot like a feature: jagged editing, heavy sound design, night raids filmed right over the men's shoulders. At Cannes in 2010 the film took the Critics' Week Grand Prize. A hard, honest watch for anyone who wants war stripped of its heroic gloss and seen through the soldiers' own eyes. Stream Armadillo online on iFILM.