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Thu. Nov. 8, 2001
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Art & Culture > Movie &Theatre > Archive
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Film Tackles Harsh Realities of Afghan Life
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With the world focused on the war in Afghanistan, a new film by controversial Iranian director Moshe Makhmalbaf - previously largely unnoticed - is making waves in Europe. Kandahar, which focuses on the lives of Afghani women under the Taliban regime and the general status of Afghanis, is now providing an international forum for Makhmalbaf to comment on the plight of Afghanistan.
Kandahar, named for the southern Afghan city, tells the story of Nafas, an Afghani in exile in Canada trying to return to her homeland via Iran to rescue her sister, who is threatening to commit suicide during the last solar eclipse of the millennium. A boy expelled from an Islamic school, a refugee family, an African-American paramedic and a man disfigured - like Nafas' sister - by a landmine, all guide Nafas on her journey.
Filmed in Afghanistan, the movie uses Afghani refugees living near the Iran-Afghanistan border as actors. Nelofer Pazira, who deftly portrays Nafas, also left Afghanistan in 1989 and resides in Canada. Like her character, she also returned to the country after receiving a desperate letter from a friend.
Pazira, a radio and television journalist in Ottawa, asked Makhmalbaf to document her journey to Afghanistan. When the timing didn't work, Makhmalbaf contacted Pazira a year later to film an adaptation of her story. These true-to-life points give the movie a documentary-like feeling.
Makhmalbaf, who has made 16 movies, says his aim was to bring world attention to the plight of Afghani refugees. As one of Iran's foremost directors, Makhmalbaf's body of work - called caustic and controversial by many of his biographers and critics - has received mixed reviews in Iran and around the world. His life itself is made for a movie. Born in to poverty in Tehran, he was a teenage "militant" opposed to the Shah's reign and to the Iranian cinema.
In post-revolutionary Iran, Makhmalbaf eventually began to make films himself, some of which would later be banned in Iran. His early works were for the arts bureau of the Organization for the Propagation of Islamic Thought, which he helped found. Then, in the late 1980s, Makhmalbaf burst onto the scene with The Peddler, which drew on the film styles of Alfred Hitchcock and Frederico Fellini.
As his career progressed, Makhmalbaf moved away from Islamic moral commentary to liberal stances on the Iran-Iraq war, casualties of the war and other topics like adultery and love. With Kandahar, Makhmalbaf returned to the topic of Afghanistan, which he first dealt with in his second film, The Cyclist.
The director says he studied more than 10,000 pages of books and documents on Afghanistan and thus has a different image of the country than portrayed to the rest of the world.
"[Afghanistan] is a more complicated, different and tragic picture, yet sharper and more positive," he writes in "Limbs of No Body," a lengthy opinion piece published in June in The Iranian. "It is an image that needs attention rather than forgetfulness and suppression."
The true freedom fighters of Afghanistan are the "ordinary people struggling to stay alive," Makhmalbaf writes. And because Afghanistan's original tragedy is poverty, neighboring countries should develop economic relations with the country instead of utilizing "political-military interventions," he adds. Though Makhmalbaf opposes the Taliban regime, he believes the United States' bombing of the country will not help Afghani women.
In another essay on the troubled situation of Afghanistan, Makhmalbaf writes that the little he can do to bring the country's plight to the world's attention is not enough. "Even now that I have finished making Kandahar, I have arrived at nowhere in my profession," he writes. "I don't believe that the little flame of knowledge kindled by a report or a film can illuminate the deep ocean of human ignorance."
Yet due to its juxtaposition with the United State's bombing campaign, Kandahar is slowly garnering attention from film critics and movie buffs for its harsh look at the lives of Afghani women. And though Makhmalbaf previously pushed Islamic boundaries with some of his films, his fierce commitment to publicizing the difficult lives of Afghanis through the voice of Kandahar may make the difference he is hoping for.
Kandahar is now being shown throughout the United States in the Human Rights Film Festival and will be released nationwide in January 2002.
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Dilshad D. Ali’s writing reaches across the United States to address lifestyle topics pertinent to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Ali has covered movie premieres, film festivals, art exhibitions, concerts, and numerous other cultural stories, including the effect of September 11 on New York’s cultural landscape for IslamOnline. Ali is a 1997 University of Maryland journalism graduate. You can reach her at artculture@iolteam.com
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