Kandahar

If you really want to know, especially if you are a woman, how it was and in many ways probably still is, to live in Afghanistan, you should see this movie. This is truly shocking, without any seen physical violence. But the violence here is anyway bigger than in most "action movies" together.

The plot is about the Afghanian woman who is living in Canada. She has, through un-official ways, heard that her sister, still living i Kandahar, is planning to commit suicide. The Canadian/Afghanian woman tries to reach her sister and Kandahar. But there are obstacles, so to say.

This is like seeing a documentary and you get a real illusion of the terrible Afghan life. It deforms everyone, but it's also clear that it's not only the Taliban regime which is to blame for everything. Poverty deforms people morally. It even deforms the war victims without legs, who tries to cheat in rough ways to get prosthesis, obviously in order to sell them.

This is to be recommended. Definitely not a mainstream film.

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.

A haunting depressing but fascinating film. I used to believe (naively) in the melting pot theory but the melting pot does not exist. Some cultures are so far removed from what we have been brought up to believe in that is is almost impossible to connect with in any shape or form.

I have always believed that each culture should be looked at on its own merits and the Western Christian/Judeao civilisation is not necessarily the answer to it all. But how can anybody find any merit in a society run by someone like the Taliban. Everybody is opressed, the women more than any, but everybody lives a miserable life. There is no compassion, no respect for divergent views. The poverty is so all pervading that survival at the most basic level is all that matters.

The film is not really a coherent narrative, more a series of vignettes showing what life was like under the Taliban. Despite the amateur acting it is a powerful film. A number of powerful images, the most powerful, to me, is the scene depicting how female patients are dealt with by a "doctor". Horrifying. Western society has many many faults but by god I'm glad I live in it.

When you see `Kandahar,' it's almost impossible to believe that you're watching a film set in the late 20th Century. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film takes place in Afghanistan in the latter days of the Taliban regime, when women were not merely viewed as second class citizens, but were denied any form of education or civil rights and even had to go out in public covered from head to toe to prevent men from seeing their faces. The filmmaker takes us to the heart of this alien and frightening world and makes us see, perhaps for the first time on the big screen, just how horrific life was for women in that time and place.

`Kandahar' is less a narrative film than a series of fascinating vignettes that drive home the realities of life in that part of the world. What plot there is involves the efforts of a female Canadian journalist to sneak back into her native country to prevent her desperate sister in Kandahar from committing suicide at the next solar eclipse. But that is really just a string on which to hang the individual pearls that make up the film. What is of primary interest to both the filmmaker and the audience are the various people the journalist encounters and the many experiences she undergoes. Hidden beneath her own burka, she witnesses firsthand the devastating poverty, the utter degradation and de-humanization of women, and the authoritarian oppression that defined life in that country during the Taliban rule. Along the way, she meets an American doctor who is trying his hardest to in some way relieve the misery of these people, but who finds himself waging a losing battle against the primitivism and theocratic oppression that have made life a living hell for the common citizenry of the country. She also encounters a seemingly endless group of people who have become dismembered by all the land mines left over from the Afghani war with the Russians. There is one remarkable scene wherein hordes of desperate, one-legged men hobble on crutches across the desert as Red Cross helicopters rain prosthetic limbs down onto the sands below. It is merely one among many images from the film that seer themselves into the viewer's memory. Another is a scene in which a male doctor has to examine his female patients through a hole cut out of a sheet, not even being allowed to talk to the woman directly about her symptoms but having to get his information through a male (or female child) `interpreter.'

Makhmalbaf keeps the ending of the film deliberately ambiguous which might frustrate some viewers but which actually adds to the verisimilitude of the piece. In the same way, much of the acting in the film borders on the amateurish at times, but again that contributes to the pseudo-documentary aura that the film must have to be truly effective. A clear-cut narrative resolution and slick performances by obviously professional actors would likely rob the film of its much-needed sense of immediacy.

`Kandahar,' by providing a voice to so many voiceless people, is a film that cries out to be seen.

The comment on the Indian music is off base - Indian music and DVDs are common in Afghanistan as the local entertainment industry is still recovering from the Taliban.

Bollywood film DVDs are sold in Kabul. Pictures and posters of Indian actresses are popular here. It isn't unusual to hear recorded Sitar music here in Kabul.

Afghan and Indian music was distributed secretly at great risk during the Taliban reign.

There is just not enough Afghan material yet and Afghans love music, even if they don't understand Urdu.

There is a scene in the movie where an instrument is seized by the Taliban before the wedding.

So the soundtrack was completely appropriate for me.

Hopefully we will see a feature film made inside Afghanistan someday. Its a beautiful and fascinating place and holds fascinating stories.