Evacuees

Like many British Columbians in 2017, Claudia Cornwall found herself glued to the news about the disastrous wildfires across the province. Her worry was personal: her cabin at Sheridan Lake had been in the family for sixty years and was now in danger of destruction.

The U.S. government conducts a population census every 10 years, adds up the counts by geographic location, and uses the resulting numbers in formulas to allocate seats in the House of Representative and Electoral College, and to make public funding and tax decisions. It has served as an essential tool of representative democracy since 1790. The raw data from the census also serve as a decennial snapshot of the nation, a very long list, organized by household, ideally of all people resident on census day, with additional information on the name, age, race, sex, geographic location, and other characteristics for each individual.

Tells the inside story of the 18 monumental days in August 2021 when the US withdrew its troops from Afghanistan and subsequently evacuated thousands of Afghan citizens from Kabul airport after the Taliban seized the city. It was the largest airlift in US modern history, which despite the chaos and suffering, rescued 124,000 people. Combining previously unseen on-the-ground archival footage from the evacuation with exclusive interviews with evacuees, eye-witnesses, US marines and Taliban fighters, the film also includes dramatic testimony from Afghan citizens attempting to flee. They recount their struggle to reach the airport, which was their last hope of leaving the country before the widely feared Taliban took control.