Kandahar: The veiled reality

“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.”

"Assuming that cinema is art, trade and industry, and while the European cinema offers sex and violence, the Indian cinema sells dreams and the Iranian cinema tries to sell poetry."

“Why on earth did I make that film?” “I don’t know, but as Pascal put it: ‘The heart has reasons of which the mind is unaware.’

- Mohsen Makhmalbaf, from a conversation with Werner Herzog

If Beizai and Abbas Kiarostami form the twin pillars of Iranian cinema, Mohsen Makhmalbaf represents its strongest component since the advent of the Islamic revolution. Makhmalbaf, who emerged from an underprivileged background and was at first strongly identified with the Islamic regime, is a self-taught filmmaker. His prolific body of work includes 32 films. He overcame a life of poverty and a flirtation with crime to become one of the most celebrated figures in Iranian Cinema. At the age of 17, Makhmalbaf, then the founder of an Islamic Militant group opposed to the Shah, attempted to disarm a policeman. The incident, which Makhmalbaf later revisited in 1996's "A Moment of Innocence", succeeded only in getting Makhmalbaf shot and put in jail. A central figure in Iran’s current movie wave, a prolific novelist, screenwriter and director whose films frequently earn him the wrath of Iranian censors, Mohsen Makhmalbaf is widely known even outside festivals and art-house circles.

Since becoming a filmmaker, Makhmalbaf has written, directed, and edited more than 30 feature films and shorts in addition to writing the scripts for and editing the films of numerous other Iranian directors. His movies have been shown across the globe and have been featured in the international film festival circuit over 1,000 times.

Blessed with extraordinary timing, Kandahar (2001), a Farsi movie, became Makhmalbaf's most popular film to date, even though it returns to the director's angrier, more abrasive period. Unlike his earlier films, Kandahar shows both passion and artistic maturity. Kandahar, addresses both the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban and the accumulated misery of the Afghan people. The film premiered at the Cannes film festival of 2001, but didn't get much attention at first. After 9/11, however, it was widely shown and won accolades worldwide including the Federico Fellini Prize from UNESCO in 2001.

Kandahar or Safar e Ghandehar is a film that tells about a journey towards Kandahar, the second largest city of Afghanistan, undertaken by Nafas, a young female journalist who escaped Afghanistan with her family but must return and race against time in an attempt to rescue her sister. Nafas, an Afghani refugee who fled to Canada when the Taliban came to power, receives word in 1999 that her sister will commit suicide at the last solar eclipse of the millennium due to unbearable conditions under the Taliban, both as a woman and as a casualty of a landmine. As the film proceeds, Nafas learns more and more about the hardships women face under the Taliban, and even more so, how years of war have destroyed Afghan society. The film is inspired by the real-life experience of actress Nelofer Pazira, who plays Nafas. In 1989, she fled her homeland of Afghanistan and later received a similar letter not from a sister, but from a long-time friend who wanted to end her life in a similar situation starting her trek from the Iran-Afghanistan border, Nafas disguises herself as the fourth wife of an elderly Afghan man. As Nafas’ desperation grows (she has only three days to reach Kandahar before her sister kills herself, on the day of the last solar eclipse of the century), the images grow more and more dreamlike. At one point, Nafas encounters a madrasah, where boys with AK47 rifles intone verses from their holy book as a bearded mullah looks on. Later, with the help of an English-speaking African American doctor, she wanders into a Red Cross relief center for mine victims. Nafas’s guide, hidden behind a false beard, points out to her that the only technological progress allowed in the country is weaponry. One healthy man named Sahid continually begs the nurses to let him have a set of legs for his mother -- legs he will no doubt sell on the black market. The doctor guide persuades Sahid, who finally gets a pair of artificial legs, to accompany Nafas in her journey, until they run into a wedding party traveling into Kandahar. Nafas attempts to fit in with the party, but the end of the road is unfortunately near for her. Dressed in burkas, the pair joins a wedding party which is stopped by the Taliban because they are playing musical instruments and singing--forbidden by Afghan law. Her guide is taken away and she is unveiled.Makhmalbaf ominously concludes by showing us Nafas’ point of view as she lowers her burkha,literally and powerfully drawing a veil over her fate. Captured, she seems destined to fall into the same kind of life that she hoped to help her sister escape. Interestingly the film begins and ends with that brilliant shot of lowering of the burkha by Nafas, perhaps reminding us of the famous couplet:

“And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started”.

This shot of the movie, a solar eclipse as seen through the burka’s mesh and its blinding effects seem to have irradiated the heroine into a kind of waking stupor. Nafas’ journey is long and rambling and may have only taken place in her head. But, as the movie’s director Mohsen Makhmalbaf implicitly asks in every scene, what is Afghanistan but a state of mind?

Its final sequence is a Felliniesque wedding procession which Nafas joins in a final bid to reach Kandahar. With its multi-colored burkas and loud chanting, the procession feels vaguely supernatural and it could even represent the final throes of Nafas’ delirium. When the procession is halted by Taliban troops, the dream finally descends into nightmare

It is filmed documentary-style, but the plot is heavily scripted. Also, the English-language dialogue suffers from flat delivery. The protagonist seems phony; every potentially poignant moment is ruined by her deadpan method of speaking.

Visually, the film is stunning at times, especially when one sees the wedding party march in the desert. The sea of burqas in contrasting colors (such as emerald, black, ochre yellow, peach, white, purple, etc.) is absolutely stunning. There's even surrealism when prosthetic legs for land mine victims at a Red Cross camp parachute to the ground

But the quality of the cinematography is not enough to rescue the flawed direction. The vast open spaces also allow Makhmalbaf and his outstanding cinematographer, Ebrahim Ghafouri, to create a steady flow of stunning images, accompanied by Mohammad Reza Darvishi's intoxicating yet spare score.

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. This is the story of a country that's been ravaged by its own nature, history, economy, politics and the unkindness of its neighbors. The story of Afghanistan is real. However, the movie does not render a fair job in reflecting the background of it. The situation is miserable; but what caused such misery in Afghanistan? Afghanistan has suffered centuries old imperialism at the hands of the British and then the Russian and now Americans who played their Great Game on the chessboard of Eurasia. There is a passage in the movie to the effect that somebody will come to liberate them. Those imperialists came in the name of civilization; French did to Algeria, the British did to India; all in the name of bringing them civilization. It was White Man's Burden to do so. The film focuses in particular on the women and children forced to survive under hostile conditions. Their marginal existence in the desert sands on the border of Iran and Afghanistan reflects their status within the Taliban-ruled country from which they live in exile. Even more dramatically, the film explores the plight of those who have lost limbs from land mines.

Particularly informative is the commentary in English by actress Nelofer Pazira that is included on the DVD. Her comments reveal in eloquent detail not only the making of the film but the rationale behind the creative choices made, often on the fly, as the film crew worked under difficult and dangerous conditions. While western news coverage continues to focus on the military and political aspects of warfare in the Middle East, "Kandahar" does much to reveal the devastating impact on noncombatants. The reason to watch this film is to see the people the heroine meets.

The plot is not very thoroughly developed. The scenery is beautiful, in a stark way, and the plot is barely enough to keep a viewer dramatically involved, but the point is to learn about life in today's Afghanistan.

The Taliban is gone, but the socio-cultural matrix which gave rise to its existence still flourishes in Afghanistan. It will take a lot more than a few years to heal that wounded country
Writing in The New York Times,A.O.Scott noted that both Kandahar and Abbas Kiarostami’s “ABC Africa”(about Ugandan orphans) "contain moment of sublime visual poetry that at once heighten and complicate their humanitarian message”. Even though it deals directly with neither war nor terrorist violence, it is an anti war movie with a difference.