The war documentary the Marine Corps tried to stop.

Miles Lagoze enlisted at 18 and was deployed to Afghanistan as his unit's Combat Camera, filming footage for recruitment videos and official Marine Corps releases. "We filmed what they wanted," the film's opening text reads. "But then we kept shooting."

Combat Obscura is everything that never made the recruitment ads. Marines smoking weed on patrol. Firefights that are chaotic and terrifying rather than heroic. There's hours of boredom, absurdity, cruelty, and grief, cut together with no narrator and no direct interviews. At one point the film shows a firefight, then cuts to the CNN news segment covering the same battle, built from footage Lagoze shot. The gap between the two versions is the whole film in miniature.

The Marine Corps threatened legal action to stop its release. Lagoze, by then a film student at Columbia, fought them with the Knight First Amendment Institute and won.
Seventy minutes long, and one of the most honest documents to come out of America's longest war.

Directed by Miles Lagoze