The images captured by director Pieter-Jan De Pue over a period of seven years on evocative 16 mm film, provide a strange but fascinating insight into the state in which Afghanistan is being left for the next generation. While American soldiers get ready to leave, we follow in De Pue's footsteps deep into this hidden land where young boys form outlaw gangs that control trade routes, sell explosives from abandoned landmines, and use rusty tanks as toys — they follow their own rules of war, modeled on the desolate landscape they have inherited. Fiction and fact merge seamlessly in De Pue's compelling, beautifully shot film, which captures the primitive beauty and harshness of survival in this place in an unprecedented way.

The Land of the Enlightened is preceeded by Pieter-Jan De Pue's short film O.