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What does it mean to lead men in war? What does it mean to come home? Hell and Back Again is a cinematically revolutionary film that asks and answers these questions with a power and intimacy no previous film about the conflict in Afghanistan has been able to achieve. In this groundbreaking work of cinema, two overlapping narratives are brilliantly intercut the life of a Marine at war on the front, and the life the same Marine in recovery at home, creating both a dreamlike quality and a strikingly realistic depiction of how Marines experience this war.
Following Sergeant Nathan Harris of Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, during a major assault on a Taliban stronghold, and his painful return home after a severe injury, the two stories communicate both the extraordinary drama of war and the no less shocking experience of returning home, as a whole generation of Marines struggle to find an identity in a country that prefers to be indifferent.
Still photographs couldn't convey it. Film got closer. But Dennis wanted to put people inside the experience itself. In 2013, he founded Condition One — building cameras, software, and immersive films that premiered at Sundance three years running and released the first VR film on Steam. The four-part series This is Climate Change, produced with Participant Media, took viewers to places most will never go.
Inside the scorching California wildfires from helicopter and ground level. Climate change has doubled the land burned by wildfire in the western United States.
With Al Gore on Greenland's ice sheet, standing under collapsing glaciers and witnessing rising sea levels. Companion to An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.
Above the Amazon rainforest, witnessing the devastation of deforestation to make room for the cattle industry. Premiered at Tribeca.
A once fertile village in Somalia where severe drought has turned the land to desert, forcing displacement and threatening survival.
Danfung Dennis's father gave him a camera when he was thirteen. He studied economics at Cornell, but it was the work of war photographers that changed everything — particularly James Nachtwey's Inferno, images that seared into his mind and wouldn't let go. He taught himself photography and, when he felt ready, went.
He arrived in Afghanistan in 2006 alone, without assignments or contacts, carrying a camera and an idea. On his second day in Kabul, a massive anti-American riot erupted. He was inexperienced enough to walk into it. A man charged him with a broken shovel. Another grabbed him from behind. He broke free and ran through the streets with a mob at his heels until a stranger in a white car threw open the door and pulled him to safety. The images he sent back that night were published in The New York Times. He began working regularly as a freelance photojournalist across Iraq and Afghanistan, bearing witness to a conflict most people at home experienced only as headlines.
After years of covering war, he grew frustrated. Society had become numb to the photographs — the same sanitized images recycled, a clean version of war acceptable for consumption. He needed another way to shake people from their indifference.
He picked up a Canon 5D Mark II and began shooting video, bringing the aesthetics and ethics of photojournalism into moving images. In the 130-degree heat of Helmand Province, the camera would overheat after minutes and shut itself off. Dust jammed the shutter button on the first day of the largest Marine offensive since Vietnam — 4,000 Marines being airlifted into a Taliban stronghold. He scratched the dust out with his fingernail, started recording, and got on the helicopters.
Embedded with Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, he met Sergeant Nathan Harris on that brutal first day — the last man standing when nearly everyone had collapsed from exhaustion and run out of water. Harris handed him his bottle. Months later, when the company returned home, Harris wasn't on the bus. He'd been shot by a Taliban machine gun round and nearly bled to death.
Harris invited Dennis to his hometown of Yadkinville, North Carolina. There, Dennis lived with Harris and his wife Ashley, documenting a warrior who couldn't put on his own socks, whose wife had to wash him in the shower — the other side of war that never makes it into the heroic version. The result was Hell and Back Again, shot entirely on a 5D with a custom stabilizer rig strapped to body armor. The film premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, winning both the World Cinema Jury Prize and the Cinematography Award, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
In 2013, seeking yet another way to close the distance between witness and experience, Dennis founded Condition One — a virtual reality production and technology studio. The company built proprietary camera systems and stitching software, producing immersive work for The New York Times, National Geographic, and Google, and premiered at Sundance three consecutive years. Its four-part VR series This is Climate Change transported viewers to the front lines of collapsing glaciers, burning forests, and famine.
He is based in the American West.