In 2014, Vita Maria Drygas was filming in a war zone. She had travelled to the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine to pick up footage for a documentary when she spotted a handwritten advert offering “cheap” tours of the frontline. “It was a mindfuck,” says the 39-year-old Polish director over a video call from Warsaw, with quiet intensity.
She found the idea of people buying tickets to the frontline, like a theatre production, profoundly shocking: “It was impossible. I didn’t believe it.” At first, she assumed that the advert was a sick joke or maybe a Russian provocation. But back in Poland, digging around on the internet, she discovered the hidden world of war jollies: “A huge branch of tourism that is very underground.”
She spent the next seven years making a documentary, Danger Zone, following a handful of tourists on holiday in some of the most dangerous places on the planet. There is Eleonora, an Italian living in Las Vegas who travels to Afghanistan. On an army base, she swaps her Birkenstocks for combat boots to fire ammo, and poses for a selfie holding a rifle. We also meet Rick, an American tour operator who organises bespoke trips to conflict zones that can cost $20,000 (£16,000) a week.
What is it about holidaying in the hell of a conflict zone that gives some people a thrill? “Everyone has their own reasons,” she says. “Each of my subjects has a different motivation, because people are different. It’s difficult to find a single motivation. Everyone is shaped by their experiences. Their own experiences are pushing them to go there. There’s also adrenaline, which is addictive. It’s some kind of need. It’s not my way of seeing the world, but I didn’t come to judge them.”
It’s true. Danger Zone is not a judgmental film. But the camera does not look away when things get uncomfortable. There is a deeply upsetting scene in which Rick takes American holidaymakers to a bombed-out block of flats in Syria where a family is living in the wreckage. They have lost everything. A four-year-old girl with blond pigtails catches the visitors’ attention (“She might be Californian!”). Her mother, her face lined with desperation, asks if they want to take her daughter: “Maybe she will get a better life?”
Drygas says that at every audience Q&A someone asks her about the scene. “It’s a tragic depiction of war. A mother choosing to hand over her child to strangers from a safe world rather than keep her – it’s a scream of despair.” What she doesn’t need to point out is the awfulness of a tourist buying a front-row seat to the misery.
Andrew Drury is a builder from Guildford, where he runs a successful construction company and lives with his wife and two young kids. Drury has been visiting conflict zones for 20-odd years, notching up trips to Uganda, Iraq, Syria and Chechnya. The film follows him taking a rookie war tourist under his wing in Somalia.
Over a video call from his office, Drury is friendly and thoughtful, less macho than he appears in the documentary. He doesn’t like the term “war tourism” – he prefers “dark tourism” . On his website, he describes himself as an “extreme traveller”.
Drury’s trips have led to a sideline career as a film-maker and author. He appeared in the Netflix show Dark Tourist, swimming in a radioactive lake in Kazakhstan, and published a memoir, Trip Hazard. He often crops up in the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, but says he doesn’t have any political affiliations. “I’m not left or right. I’m Andrew.”
He agrees that the media work gives the trips legitimacy. “Now, rather than going into an area for a holiday, I go for a reason and a purpose. I use my presence to tell a story.” Drury has an ease about him, open and straightforward. You can see why people want to talk to him.
When he first got the call from Drygas, he turned her down: “I told her I didn’t want to do it. It took a year to convince me.” In the end, the most newsworthy footage they shot didn’t make the final cut: the story of Drury meeting Shamima Begum. At first, he felt sorry for her. “I’ve got a daughter her age,” he says. “She looked quite frail, quite pitiful. She seemed quite apologetic.”
But after 18 months of texts and visits to her detention camp in Syria, he reached the conclusion that she is a narcissist: “She was manipulating me and using me.” Drury was on the Good Morning Britain team that scooped an interview with Begum in 2021.
In the documentary, he admits that boredom motivates his trips. “I think the everyday life that I lead is quite mundane. It’s happy, a really good life, but I’ve always wanted a little bit more, to experience a little bit more.”
The death of his 10-year-old brother, from leukaemia, might be wrapped up in there, too. “He didn’t really experience much in life; I think that may have been a spur. I’ve always wanted a little bit more out of life. Because life is really short.” There is the rush of adrenaline, too. “Anyone can go to Machu Picchu, touristy places like that. Off the beaten track was always more interesting to me.”
Still, watching the film wasn’t easy, he says. There are moments that made him feel uncomfortable: scenes in Somalia where he is excitable, pumped up by the danger (“this shit is real!”). “If you were in the audience, you might think: ‘He’s enjoying other people’s misery here,’” Drury concedes.
Last year, he had a minor heart attack, which put a stop to travel for six months. Now, he is on the road again, in Kyiv, where he interviewed the mayor, Vitali Klitschko, for GB News. Drygas was there as a camera operator.
While they were there, the Russians launched a drone attack on the city. People have asked Drygas if she was scared. “No. I was so pissed off!” she says. “They are destroying the country, people are dying. I felt such a hatred. This feeling in me of …” She shakes her head. “Motherfuckers.”
There is a small pause. “I ask myself: where does this evil come from? I know it’s a naive question. I know the geopolitical answers. But when you’re on the ground, looking around, you ask yourself: how can this happen? Of course, it is not only Ukraine. I have a profound disagreement with this world full of senseless violence and brutality.”
• Danger Zone screens at the ICA as part of the Kinoteka Polish film festival on 14 March and is released on digital platforms on 22 March.
