Safar-e Ghandehar

Filmed on the Iran/Afghanistan border, KANDAHAR is a semi-documentary style movie that chronicles the perilous journey undertaken by an expatriate female journalist, Nafas, to reach the city of Kandahar, where she hopes to rescue her sister from committing suicide during an impending eclipse. However, Nafas's odyssey is really little more than a device to lift the veil on the poverty and hardship of life in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Through a series of vignettes, the movie succeeds beautifully in revealing insights that are both fascinating and harrowing. It is almost impossible to imagine a culture so far removed from the relatively comfortable life enjoyed by more ‘civilised' nations. Young boys rock back and forth, reciting the Koran while learning to become Mullahs, pausing only to recite the meaning and purpose of the sabre and semi-automatic machine gun when prompted by their teacher; young girls have lessons in how to resist the temptation to pick up possibly booby-trapped dolls; a doctor treats his female patient by speaking to them via children as they sit either side of a makeshift screen, and conducts his examinations through a small hole in the screen; the threat and consequences of land-mines pervade everybody's life, and year-long waits for prosthetic legs are commonplace, so that prosthetics become a black-market currency.

True, the acting is poor – most of the cast are non-professionals, many never even having seen a moving picture before appearing in this film – but, the purpose of this movie was not to dazzle us with superior acting; it was to open an eye to the hardship endured by both men and women in an oppressive regime, and, at this, it succeeds beautifully.

The film's great success with audiences was in part due to the timing of its release, at a moment when Afghanistan had been catapulted into the headlines by the activities of the Taliban and the attacks of September 11, 2001…

But the motion picture, directed by one of Iran's most prominent film artists, is much more than a story pulled out from the headlines… It stars Nelofer Pazira, a female journalist, based in Canada, playing Nafas, who is trying to get into Afghanistan to reach her sister who lives in Kandahar… Nafas's sister is threatening suicide because of the intolerable oppression of women by the Taliban…

In the course of her long and dangerous journey, Nafas encounters a mixed array of Afghan people, many of them refugees… An old man agrees to take her into the country disguised as his fourth wife… Later she acquires a young boy, Khak (Sadou Teymouri), as her guide after he has been expelled from a religious school… On the way she meets Tabib Sahid, an African-American who had come to fight the Soviets but who is now practicing medicine…

"Kandahar" mixes documentary authenticity with extraordinary moments of visual strangeness ad beauty… The Burka is an ever-present symbol of women's subjugation, yet underneath women wear varnished nails and lipstick, and their brightly-colored robes affirm their individuality… The film placed the suffering of the Afghan people, particularly the women, on an international stage

This movie is not for those brought up on a diet of Hollywood entertaining blockbusters with amazing special effects, thrilling and twisting plots, character development and a satisfying denouement.

Kandahar by an acclaimed Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, carries different layers of meaning, conveyed creatively through an artistic process. The image as a language is more powerful than words can ever convey. He uses "real" people rather than actors to enhance authenticity.

Afghani-Canadian, Nafas, has three days to save her despairing sister from suicide in Kandahar, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, but can't enter it normally because of her journalist credentials. Her only choice is to trek from the Iranian border. Mohsen uses this narrative to capture the horrendous ravages and severe plights of a war-torn country steeped in an oppressive culture for women and shackled by the terrifying ideology of the Taliban. He employs no special effects, no physical violence, no explosions, not a single gunshot, not a single drop of blood - just images of everyday life.

Nafas can't travel as an unaccompanied woman and she must wear the head to toe burqa covering. For us the burqa is a symbol of the woman's oppression, to the Afghani male it's his honor. Women are meant to be largely invisible, so poignantly captured in family photo portraits. A doctor can only examine his female patient through a small hole in a curtain separating the two and communicate indirectly via a third party such as an accompanying child. Girls are removed from schools en masse. "For a woman living under full cover hope is for a day she'll be seen."

The austere landscape reinforces the grinding poverty and the meager means of existence, inevitably giving rise to lawlessness and a survival instinct that grabs every opportunity for financial gain. And there is little chance of escaping this hopelessness as the only aspiration for a boy is to be a mullah, a religious figure, through meaningless rote memorization of the Koran evidenced by repetitions of a mantra venerating the only technology allowed – the AK47 rifle.

The most chilling indictment of the war is the hordes of people with missing limbs blown up by land mines which litter the entire country. The most important currency for these people is the prosthetic limb for which they are entitled only one per year. Everyone, including the able-bodied, needs a pair, just in case. The surrealism of a horde of guys racing on crutches to receive crude prosthetic limbs parachuting down from the sky sears the mind.

The large bridal party adorned in their fluttering multi-colored burqas (supposedly covering only women) trudging across the barren landscape in rhythm to a numbing chant and tribal drumbeat heading towards a wedding in Kandahar conveys a notion of traditional bliss and innocence. That vanishes like a mirage when the party is intercepted at a Taliban checkpoint.

The curious presence of an African American looking for God, but ends up as a "doctor" administering whatever relief he can to basic health issues, is a statement that the core problem in Afghanistan is not religion per se but a dysfunctional country in a state of crippling deprivation of everything.

This movie was released in 2001, a decade after Taliban forces, aided and abetted by the United Sates, defeated the might of the then Soviet Union in their misguided and disastrous attempt to invade Afghanistan. This left the shattered country at the mercy of the extremist ideologically driven Taliban. The United States' response to 9/11 was to invoke a war against terror targeting the same Taliban forces. More bombs and military destruction followed. The country has once again been plunged into unimaginably crippling devastation.

The overarching message of this movie is the carnage and utter futility of war in bringing about desired social outcomes. It would appear Americans have neither learned the lessons of the Vietnam War nor from the Soviet's recent experience. Bombs and other military hardware are useless against an enemy with neither significant infrastructure nor targets to be destroyed. Deploying highly equipped alien boots on the ground is not going to win the hearts and minds of a population devoid of the means of livelihood, scarred by decades of war and lacking the education to escape this quagmire. The entire country becomes an even more fertile ground for breeding and recruiting terrorists – the antithesis of the war's objective. The American effort in Afghanistan is reputed to cost $1 billion each day. Imagine this amount redirected into developing and educating the country instead.

Makhmalbaf makes a pointed reference to the total uselessness of the UN. Its flag, being a symbol of neutrality that was meant to protect the traveling party, ended up planted next to a human skeleton in the desert. The only thing of tokenistic "value" recovered from the skeleton was a bejeweled ring, which ended up being worthless.

This is an extremely beautiful film which inhabits a visual and emotional territory somewhere between Werner Herzog and Pasolini.

As others have stated, the actors are non-professionals and the plot is not the stuff of Hollywood melodrama. However the images and sounds are haunting and profound. Mahkmalbaf is truly a poet of the cinema.

The film does not attempt to make a political analysis of the situation of Afghanistan in 2001, but operates on a more humanistic and emotional level, showing the human consequences, the poverty both material and spiritual of life under the Taliban and the indifference of the outside world.

The "doctor" character, far from being implausible, is played by a real person with a very similar history. He is also a stand-in within the film for Makhmalbaf himself, who started as an Islamic fundamentalist revolutionary but has moved towards a more open-minded humanism.

The film itself describes a circle, the first scene is also the last, the sun shining through a burqa onto a woman's face. Between are unforgettable images, and a transit across a surreal and nightmarish landscape. Surrender yourself and you will really feel you have been on a journey.

The UK DVD also includes "The Afghan Alphabet" a similarly fictionalised documentary on the struggle to bring education to the three million or so Afghan refugees in Iran.

Nafas is an Afghan refugee in Canada, separated from what remains of her family. When she receives a letter from her sister in Kandahar saying that she intends to kill herself at the next eclipse, Nafas sets out to enter Afghanistan and find her sister in order to rescue her. Joining a family traveling across the desert she quickly remembers why she fled the country in the first place as her status as a woman is as dangerous as the unseen landmines as she tries to find her sister before time runs out.

I knew little about this film prior to watching it apart from that it was popular mostly due to its unfortunate relevance. Watching it from the start to the end I must admit that, as a film or a story it was not as good as some viewers have said. The narrative is simplistic and seems to alter the passing of time to suit itself, while major holes in plotting are rather annoying if that is what you are focusing on. The film also struggles in terms of characters, with Nafas being rather bland and hard to care for, her sister being unseen and not in any more danger than those we do see (ie minimising our passion for the quest) and even the noble Talib Sahid came across as rather an unlikely character to stumble upon.

However, I still consider this to be a film worth seeing even after all that. Why? Well, simply because of the view it gives us of Afghanistan – a view that not even the British media did a good job of giving us when the conflict started. I watched this thinking 'this is the country we have been bombing for several years now?' and, while I knew it was hardly the most technologically advanced country, it doesn't really hit home until you see it and, with US news coverage of this side of the country being limited to hyped-up soldiers then this film should be seen to help balance it all out. So Nafas' journey is little more than an excuse to show many aspects of the country within a sort of story and, as that, it is worth seeing – it is hard not to feel for the people as you see the treatment of women, the poor facilities, the horrors of landmines and so on.

True to the weakness of the plot, the ending just sort of 'happens' and those who had been holding to the hope of the vague narrative becoming stronger will also be let down. This is not a film to come to for a story or a strong plot because in these areas it is pretty weak and not very good as a film as you'd expect one to be. However it provides insight into a country that we have all heard a lot about over the past few years and, for that and that alone, it is valuable and worth seeing if you can get the chance.