Sometimes the internet brings unforeseen
gems to one’s attention, which one would never have heard of otherwise, let
alone experienced.
I came across one of those gems today; a
lovely little film called Kandahar.
Many people don’t realise just how
spectacularly nasty the Taliban rule over Afghanistan was. In the terrible
years between 1996 and 2001, Afghanistan was turned into a landmine-strewed,
famine-ravaged wasteland where nothing but the Taliban version of Islam – which
was, in its essence, little more than boiled-over Pashtun tradition steeped in
ultrafundamentalistic Islam – was allowed to exist. In its essence, it’s what
this film is about – the effect of the Taliban on Afghanistan.
Another thing many people don’t realise is
that one of the very, very few nations which actually took concrete steps to
oppose the Taliban rule in Afghanistan (alongside Russia and India) was Iran. While the US was practically
falling over itself in 1996 to tacitly approve the Taliban takeover of Kabul,
and was busily negotiating with it for pipeline rights as late as 1998, which
shows the Nobel Peace Prizident’s Good War in particularly hypocritical light, Iran
was overflowing with Afghan refugees, and unlike Pakistan did not attempt to
turn them into its own version of Holy Warriors to meddle in its northern
neighbour’s affairs. And this is an Iranian movie, with a distinctly Iranian
directorial touch. It’s not new: it was made back in 2000 and premiered internationally
in 2001, whereupon it largely sank without a trace, Though most of it was shot
in Afghan refugee camps in Iran, some was clandestinely shot in (Taliban-controlled)
Afghanistan.
Based partly on a true story, it tells the tale of Nafas, an Afghan-born woman who has
escaped to Canada and made good there as a journalist. Her sister, however,
remains behind in Afghanistan, in the Taliban capital of Kandahar, and manages
to send word to Nafas of her intention to commit suicide before the first
eclipse of the millennium. With only a few days to get to her sister before the
eclipse, Nafas flies to a refugee camp in Iran, and there pays a returning
Tajik family to let her tag along, clad in a burqa, pretending to be one of
them.
Once in Afghanistan, the returning refugees
are promptly set upon by Taliban soldiers and robbed of all their belongings,
including their mini-truck, whereupon the Tajik family decides to return to
Iran, leaving Nafas to her own devices. In a blackly comic episode, a young boy
expelled from his village madrassa for not being able to recite the Koran
satisfactorily (including not swaying back and forth hard enough) volunteers to
take her to Kandahar for $50. And during this journey he stops to rob a
skeleton in the desert of a ring he hopes to sell in order to be able to help
feed his mother.
Ravaged with fever and dysentery, with just
two days left to reach her sister, Nafas stops off at a village doctor’s for
treatment. This doctor, who examines his female patients through a hole cut in
a sheet, turns out to be a black American convert to Islam who had come to
Afghanistan imagining it to be a nation of Allah. Thoroughly disillusioned, he
now hides behind a false beard and says bitterly that in Taliban Afghanistan nothing
modern is allowed – except weaponry. And he, who had once imagined that he
would find paradise on earth, is too frightened to enter Kandahar.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan is also a land sown
with mines after decades of war, and full of men – not soldiers, but farmers,
labourers, young men who have hardly begun to live – who have lost legs to
these weapons. A few struggling Red Cross medics try desperately to supply
false legs to the huge number of people for whom possessing a prosthesis
literally means the difference between life and death, because if they can’t
walk, they can’t work, and that means they will starve. And these wretched
sufferers in turn draw con artists who try and wangle false limbs to sell on
the side, because there’s a waiting list of a year for a leg, and every single
one is precious.
What kind of end can come of so much
devastation, so much unhappiness and desperation? I won’t reveal much more here
except to say that the title of the movie has shades of Waiting For Godot, and that it has absolutely everything to do with
all that has gone before. Thinking back, any other conclusion would be asinine.
I’d give this film four and a half stars
out of five. Half a star is being deducted for what I consider a piece of
pointless “symbolism”: at the beginning of the film, Nafas sits in a helicopter
which drops artificial limbs, pair by pair, by parachute to a field hospital
below, while a doctor called Magda talks to the pilot by radio. Close to the
end of the film, she is in a field hospital which is being similarly bombarded
by pairs of limbs by helicopter...while the doctor in charge, Magda, speaks the exact same words by radio to the
pilot. Recursive plot lines without a particular reason never did much for me.
But that’s really a minor irritant, as is
the use of a Sanskrit prayer as recurrent background score. I’d be willing to
forgive much, much more in a film like this which manages to do so much on so
little, budget-wise. And it’s not just the starkly bleak and at the same time
beautiful Afghan landscape or the evocative culture I’m talking about, or the
hauntingly lovely faces of Afghan children, but of the simple things, like this
piece of advice offered by a teacher to girls returning from Iran to
Afghanistan:
“Today is your last day in school. In
Afghanistan, you will not be going to school...there are no schools there. You
will have to stay at home. But you mustn’t give up hope. If walls are high, the
sky is higher still. One day, the world will see your troubles and come to your
aid. If it doesn’t, you will have to stand together....if you close your eyes
and imagine that you are an ant, then the house will appear much bigger.”
Eleven years after Afghanistan was “liberated”,
the resurgent Taliban appear as the less
unattractive alternative to the cabal of venal crooks, warlords, collaborators
and rapacious government officials who rule that unhappy nation now, with the
approval of the same country which had been instrumental in the rise of the
Taliban in the first place.
The irony of it is bitter enough to make
those children weep.
The video can be viewed here.
