SO MANY WAYS TO REMEMBER
Starweek, November 3, 2007
Jim Bawden

Director Mike Sheerin produced the all-new documentary Bravo Company: Kandahar as his own video diary. The accomplished filmmaker (The Secret Mulroney Tapes) is his own narrator as he buckles down to record the images and sounds of Bravo Company stationed at Forward Operating Base Martello six hours northeast of Kandahar City. Instead of the usual heroics we get an understanding of how the beleagured company operates in a highly vulnerable base ringed with hills alive with guerrilla activities. Every approach of Afghanis is taken with caution – just who are the enemy out there anyway. Attacks come from seemingly nowhere and the Canadian officers are aware of the bases’s vulnerability. A highly superior and very tense hour.


BRAVO COMPANY: KANDAHAR
Globe & Mail, November 5, 2007
John Doyle

Bravo Company: Kandahar is a ground-level account of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan going about their daily and adangerous tasks. Filmmaker Mike Sheerin, who directs and narrates, gives viewers an authentic look at the troops on foot patrols, dealing with the locals and trying to stay safe and alive. You can make up your own mind about the meaning of the weariness the soldiers project.


HONOURING THEIR MEMORY
The Chronicle Herald, November 5, 2007
Tim Arsenault

REMEMBRANCE DAY obviously represents an opportunity to look back, but current events have a way of making the period of reflection seem as fresh as today’s headlines.

In that vein, History Television — as part of a comprehensive package of programming leading up to Sunday’s church and cenotaph ceremonies across the country — has a documentary that makes the soldiering life all too immediate.

Bravo Company Kandahar, airing Monday, Nov. 5, at 10 p.m. on the specialty channel, documents 19 days that filmmaker Mike Sheerin (Encounters With Moses, The Secret Mulroney Tapes, The Degrassi Story) spent in Afghanistan with the troops of Bravo Company at Forward Operating Base Martello, located northeast of Kandahar City.

The style is purposely spare. The only details not contained in the images are supplied by dry, first-person audio diaries made by Sheerin.

His method puts the viewer right in a claustrophobic troop carrier that breaks down on a road that is figuratively in the middle of nowhere but is, in fact, cutting across a valley that would be easily in the sights of Taliban fighters.

The soldiers are shown trying not to choke on smoke, stuck in the heat waiting for a recovery unit in a vehicle with no brakes that’s spewed fluid over the road.

The tension is palpable whenever a man pops into visibility in this no man’s land.

Sheerin eventually makes it to Martello, which gives every impression of being far removed from the main base and its fast-food joints.

Patrols are made into the Afghan mountains from the unfortunately situated camp, and the danger inherent in the questioning and detention of suspected Taliban fighters during roadside checks is described in an unadorned fashion.