Kabul, Afghanistan. It is more than a pit, a forgotten gravecarved out by American fire and civil dissension. It is not just awar zone, or an anarchist cesspool of murders outside of afilmmaker’s hotel, or a desert where bounties are placed uponAmerican heads.

September Tapes illuminates another deeper element ofthis land, its ability to choke away fear and empathy and switch aman to a survival mode that drives him for a truth so passionately,death is simply an accepted probability.

In the movie, eight tapes come back from Kabul after film makerDon Larson, a translator named Wali, and a shy cameraman called”Sunny” set out to capture the homeland from which AlQaeda hails, desiring a new dimension of terrorism to be documentedin uncensored, daring footage, with no direct ties to anyparticular media source.

Desperate for leads on interviews with men seeking or fightingBin Laden, the camera and crew quietly and loyally follows Larsonacross the Afghanistan desert to the Pakistani border, keepingevery conversation, confession and gunshot bravely squared in themiddle screen.

At times they doubt if what they’re watching actually everhappened, if people, their species, could ever so recklessly murderor be so dangerously passionate for so many opposite causes thatmake calculated murder so easy. But while the violence is hard toimagine so is the devout loyalty the three men have to keeping thecamera rolling and to the well-being of one another, ignoringambushes and threats to show the American people what really ishappening in the Middle East.

This movie provides us with actual footage of fanaticism, loveand determination that could never be explained in some patheticreview. September Tapes makes Farenheight 911 looklike “Zoobamafoo.” It is not a movie, but rather anexperience and exercise in pushing your mind’s boundaries ofthe primal human state and of bravery. Do these men justice and seetheir movie.