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Cinema - Kandahar
When Britain and the USA invaded Afghanistan in 2001 a lot of
people I knew were against the war, seeing it as a knee-jerk
reaction to the bombing of 9/11. Which led to a lot of interesting
and divergent feelings about the Taliban. It was quite easy
when you were anti-invasion, to blur your rational feelings
about the forces who were countering that invasion. “The
Taliban, they’re the good guys, aren’t they?”
said one friend, with just a hint of irony in his voice. The
film Kandahar, which was made in 2000 and released in the winter
of 2001, was a very timely release. Made by an Iranian director,
Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and starring a Afghani journalist who had
been living for years in Canada, Nelofer Pazira, the film reminds
you of what a brutal, ruthless, misogynistic regime there was
in Afghanistan when the religious fundamentalists ran the country.
The story, shot on the Iranian-Afghan border and largely starring
a non-professional cast, is an adaptation of events in which
Pazira was a real-life protagonist. She had returned to the
country of her birth to try and stop a girlfriend from committing
suicide. Later on, after failing in her mission, she met Makhmalbaf,
who persuaded her to return to shoot a semi-fictional movie
version of her ordeal. While the resulting footage can be amateurishly
rough round the edges, it is never anything but extremely powerful. |
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On the road to Kandahar: one
of many starkly surreal scenes from
a timely film |
