HYENA ROAD (Canada - English)

 Now with a title like this, it is going to be a film about Africa, isn't it? No it is about Canadian armed forces in Afghanistan engaging in a serious skirmish with the enemy in a rugged desert landscape that hardly seems worth arguing about with a fellow goat herd over a sparse blade of grass. 

Even more astounding is how all the soldiers are wired for instant communication with their control centre back at base.   The communication is constant back and forth using a language consisting of numbers with the occasional word. Interspersed by a constant crackle of the radio.

A battle takes place in a village of mud huts and the wall of the one they are sheltering in is blasted open by a bomb. One of them calls for help 'ASAP'. They have just determined that the road their back up tanks had been travelling along had been land mined. There were three suspicious looking black marks on the dirt road that had been shot at by one of the Canadian marksmen. One, two, nothing. Three, BOOM! So who were they expecting to arrive ASAP? 

Back at base, a uniformed female officer is looking like she knows she is being filmed performing her important task of maintaining radio contact with the troops. Another job well done. Her male superior looks relieved. Meanwhile back on the battle front, the village headman goes outside and somehow encourages the Afghans to disappear. The Canadians tell their listeners back at base that he has 'wild eyes'. They have a good laugh at that. But it is his wild eyes that has saved the Canadian soldiers lives. Not the radio contact and calls for help ASAP.

That was enough for me. I could not watch any more. My belief is that war is a fruitless waste of time and I was not prepared to waste any more of mine watching any more of it. Not even to find out what the relevance of the word 'hyena' was going to be.