31 Oct Telluride Mountainfilm: The Director & “The Diplomat”
They say the apple does not fall very far from the tree. But on rare occasions, with rare individuals, the apple is a tree. David Holbrooke, celebrated son (and long-time filmmaker) of celebrated diplomat Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, has always stood very very tall. But since the release of the HBO documentary “The Diplomat,” which he lovingly directed, David stands even taller. Since opening in April at the Tribeca Film Festival, “The Diplomat” has been warmly received by audiences and critics alike. The documentary is a big story about a larger-than-life historical figure, tracing Richard Holbrooke from his early days as a foreign service officer in Vietnam through his most profound success in securing a peace between Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia and, finally, to his work as U.S. point man for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The film is also an intimate portrait of a father sons David and Anthony struggled to know as he starred on the world stage. In addition to directing “The Diplomat,” David Holbrooke is widely known and highly regarded locally as director of one of Telluride’s signature festivals, Telluride Mountainfilm, whose impact he has help deepen and broaden through deft programming and the force of his personality. The following is a very recent review by Robert Adele of “The Diplomat” from the Los Angeles Times.
Mountainfilm director David Holbrooke with his father, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Credit, Jodi Cobb.
David Holbrooke’s documentary “The Diplomat,” about his father, the late, celebrated ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who died in 2010, is a rich, occasionally stirring and ultimately plaintive ode to the craft of velvet gloves, iron fists and how to point with either or both. A garrulous but often absent dad, Holbrooke had a career that spanned 50 years of foreign policy, from the hard lessons he observed as an eager foreign service officer in Vietnam, to his crowning achievement in the ’90s securing peace in the Balkans and, lastly, his troubled efforts to replicate that success in Afghanistan/Pakistan.
The interviewees are noteworthy, from world leaders (Ashraf Ghani, Bakir Izetbegovic) to colleagues, family members and admiring journalists, including a cheeky moment when Diane Sawyer deftly flips her interview around by asking David, “How angry were you at him?” The portrait that emerges, with David on camera as a respectful but quizzical son…
And here is a longer, more detailed story written by Matthew Rosenberg of the New York Times following the Tribeca screening.
In the summer of 2010, Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, began recording a secret audio diary, detailing his frustrations with a White House that he believed was too willing to listen to the military and too often mistook domestic political calculations for strategic thinking.
“That really is the way the White House thinks,” Mr. Holbrooke said in an Aug. 12, 2010, entry in the diary, the existence of which has not been previously reported. “They don’t have a deep understanding of the issues themselves, but increasingly, they’re deluding themselves into thinking they do.”
Mr. Holbrooke, a diplomatic troubleshooter who worked for every Democratic president since the 1960s, was widely known to be in conflict with the Obama administration. But the audio notes that he dictated on a near daily basis from August 2010 until his death at age 69 from a torn aorta in December of that year provide an usually candid, if one-sided, record of the internecine battles that troubled the administration over the direction of the war in Afghanistan.
The notes are featured in “The Diplomat,” a documentary about Mr. Holbrooke that will have its premiere on Thursday at the Tribeca Film Festival and will be shown on HBO in the fall. The New York Times viewed the film before its release…
And here is a trailer for the film which airs this fall on HBO:
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