Kandahar -the movie
Habshi
See what Islam does to a country . Isnt it better to be a
Hindu and be friendly to all creatures including women and take part
in colorful rituals in the short existence we have on this planet ?
The land without a face
Terrible things go on in Afghanistan - everyone knows it. So why is
Mohsen Makhmalbaf one of the few film-makers to tackle the subject?
Below, the director talks to Geoffrey Macnab; bottom, an extract from
his Afghan memoir
Geoffrey Macnab and Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Saturday August 11, 2001
The Guardian
Kandahar
Mohsen Makhmalbaf's movie Kandahar is about a young Canada-based
journalist who travels back to her native Afghanistan to try to save
her younger sister from suicide. She encounters a country in the grip
of the Taliban. It's like the wild west with turbans. There is
poverty, religious bigotry and violence wherever she goes. In one
telling scene at once comic, grotesque and beautiful, we see an army
of cripples, all of whom have lost limbs to landmines, hobbling
towards a Red Cross food package that has been dropped from the sky.
It's like something out of an old Bunuel film, but this isn't some
directorial conceit: it's a moment from what Makhmalbaf would claim is
everyday life in Afghanistan.
"The reality of Afghanistan is surreal in itself," he states. "This is
a country where 10 million of the population - the women - don't have
a face. When you watch them walking in the desert, no other picture
could be more surreal than that. When you watch people who've lost
their legs in explosions take a shovel and use it as a leg, it seems
surreal, but it's reality."
Recent events have lent the film an added resonance. The arrest
earlier this month of eight aid workers accused of trying to spread
Christianity (an offence punishable by death) is just the kind of
bizarre but terrifying occurrence that Makhmalbaf believes has now
become commonplace under the Taliban.
Makhmalbaf shot Kandahar on the border of Afghanistan, but while he
was researching the movie he secretly entered the country and
witnessed the conditions at first hand. What he found shocked him
profoundly. A courteous, humorous man, he has long been one of Iran's
most distinguished film-makers. Kandahar is perhaps his most polemical
film.
He is clearly fascinated and appalled by the mindset of the Taliban.
In the past 20 years in Afghanistan, six and a half million people
have been made refugees.
At least three million have gone to Pakistan, where there are now more
than 2,000 madaris , religious boarding schools. Here young boys,
mostly orphans, are indoctrinated in a militant way of thinking.
Makhmalbaf shows one such school in the film. Hundreds of young boys,
heads bobbing wildly, sit in a long corridor reciting the Koran as a
martinet teacher stands over them.
"When you see the Taliban as a political group, you arrive at one
conclusion, but when you look at them from a psychological
perspective, you realise that they're just a bunch of hungry kids who
end up in these schools. When they leave these places, they become
militants."
There have been few films made in or about Afghanistan. Makhmalbaf
himself shot one, The Cyclist, in 1988. Russians made a handful about
the experiences of their soldiers in the country, there were a few
propaganda pics about the mojahedin's fight against the Soviet army,
and there has been one Hollywood film - Rambo III. On the whole,
though, the country has been spurned by film-makers - hardly
surprising, when one considers that cameras aren't allowed inside its
borders. As Makhmalbaf puts it, "It's a country without an image." All
there is in the way of media is two hours of radio broadcasting every
day. "There is no television, no cinema, newspapers do not print
pictures, taking photographs or painting is considered 'impure', music
is forbidden, and women do not have the right to anything."
The picture he paints of the country, both in conversation and in
Kandahar itself, is grim in the extreme. There is no industry because
almost every kind of economic activity is proscribed. Even before the
Taliban, women were not allowed to attend school. Since he finished
the film, conditions have become worse, not better.
By making Kandahar, Makhmalbaf acknowledges, he may have put his life
at risk. "The Taliban were murdering their own opposition inside Iran,
even in the places that we were visiting. You never know what will
happen. Maybe one day they'll murder me, too."
The most ironic thing about Kandahar is that by making a movie about
probably the most repressive society on earth, Makhmalbaf won himself
an artistic freedom he would never have been allowed back home. "If I
had said 10% of what I am saying about Afghanistan about Iran, my film
would have been stopped."
Two of his films - The Nights of Zayandeh-Rood (1991) and Time of Love
(1990) - are still banned in Iran. So is his son Mezssam Makhmalbaf's
documentary How Samira Made Blackboards because his daughter Samira
(also a director) is shown with too low a neckline.
For so embattled a filmmaker, Makhmalbaf is surprisingly cheerful and
stoical. Kandahar reflects his personality. Despite the grim subject
matter, it's lyrical and often humorous. He jokes about the shyster
who spent months pretending to be him (an episode chronicled in Abbas
Kiarostami's film Close-Up). "In Iran, people still ask me if I'm the
real Makhmalbaf." He is also wryly sardonic about the labyrinthine
censorship system in his homeland. "Each time they try to stop me
making one film, I start on another one," he states, before going on
to explain the intricacies of getting a movie released in Iran; of how
he has to deal with political, ideological and cultural commissars.
Kandahar made most other films in Cannes this year seem trivial. Not
that either critics or buyers paid much attention to it. As if to
underline western indifference, it was passed over for the main awards
and fobbed off with the obscure "Ecumenical" prize instead. Although
it's screening in Edinburgh, no UK distributor has yet had the
gumption to acquire it. In Europe, Makhmalbaf ruminates, people seem
more worried about the destruction of stone Buddhas than what happens
to the people. After my interview with him, he e-mailed me an article
he had recently written about the situation, some of which is
reproduced below. The opening paragraph made for chilling reading: "If
you read this article in full, it will take about an hour of your
time. In this one hour, some 14 more people will have died in
Afghanistan of war and hunger and 60 others will have become refugees
from Afghanistan to other countries..."
'They had come to kidnap or kill me. I sent them the other way - and
ran'
I have travelled within Afghanistan and witnessed the reality of the
life of that nation. As a film-maker, I have produced two feature
films on Afghanistan: The Cyclist (1988) and Kandahar (2001). Yet
Afghanistan is a nation without a picture. Afghan women are faceless:
10 million out of the 20 million population don't get a chance to be
seen. During the past few years there has been no television
broadcasting, only a couple of two-page newspapers with no pictures.
This is the sum total of media in Afghanistan. Painting and
photography are prohibited. No journalists are allowed to enter
Afghanistan, let alone take pictures.
In 21st-century Afghanistan there are no movie theatres, either.
Previously, there were 14 cinemas, and film studios produced
imitations of Indian movies. In the world of cinema that produces
2,000 to 3,000 films per year, nothing is forthcoming from
Afghanistan.
Hollywood did, however, produce a movie, Rambo III, based on
Afghanistan. It was filmed entirely in Hollywood and not one Afghan
was included. The only authentic scene was Rambo's presence in
Peshawar, Pakistan, and that was thanks to the art of back
projection.Is this Hollywood's image of a country where 10% of the
people were wiped out, 30% became refugees and about one million are
currently dying of hunger?
The Russians produced two films concerning the memoirs of Russian
soldiers during the occupation of Afghanistan. The mojahedin made a
few films after the Russian retreat, which are essentially
propagandist war movies and not a real representation of Afghanistan.
Two feature films have been produced in Iran on the situation of
Afghan immigrants: Friday and Rain. I made my two films. That is the
entire catalogue of images of Afghans in the world media. Even the
number of documentaries is limited. Afghanistan is a country without
an image.
I never forget those nights filming Kandahar. While our team searched
the deserts with flashlights, we would see dying refugees like herds
of sheep left in the desert. When we took those that we thought were
dying of cholera to hospitals in Zabol, we realised that they were
dying of hunger.
In 1986, I took a road trip from Mirjaveh in Pakistan to Quetta and
Peshawar. I got on a colourful bus filled with all kinds of strange
people. People with long, thin beards, turbans and long dresses.
At first, I wasn't aware that the bus roof was loaded with drugs. The
bus drove across dirt expanses without roads. We arrived at a surreal
gate that neither separated nor connected anything. It was just a gate
in the middle of the desert. The bus stopped. A group of bikers
appeared and asked our driver to step down. They brought out a sack of
money and counted it. Our driver and his assistant took the money and
left on the bikes. The new driver announced that he was now the owner
of the bus and everything in it. Together with the bus, we had been
sold.
This transaction was repeated every few hours. We found out that a
particular party controlled each leg of the route and every time the
bus was sold, the price increased. There were also caravans that
carried Dushka heavy machine-guns on the back of the camels. Bullets
were sold in bags as if they were beans. Well, how would the world's
drug trade take place without such exchanges?
Wanting to film the starving Afghans, I called Kamal Hussein, the UN
representative from Bangladesh. I told him I wanted permission to go
to north Afghanistan (controlled by Ahmad Shah Massoud) and Kandahar
(controlled by the Taliban). Eventually just two of us received
approval to travel with a small video camera. We were to go to
Islamabad, Pakistan, and take a 10-passenger UN airplane.
It took two weeks for the UN office to inquire when it would be
convenient for us to depart. We were ready but they said that it would
take another month. "It will get colder in a month and more people
will be dying - it would make your film more interesting," they said.
They recommended February. I asked, "More interesting?" They replied
that perhaps it would provoke the conscience of the world. I didn't
know what to say.
People told me to be careful. There is always the threat of kidnapping
or terrorism at the borders. The Taliban are reputed to assassinate
suspected opponents en route between Zahedan and Zabol. I kept saying
my subject was humanitarian, not political.
Still, one day when we had finished filming near the border, I came
across a group that had come either to kill or kidnap me. They asked
me about Makhmalbaf. I was sporting a long thin beard and wearing
Afghan dress. I sent them the other way and began running.
The only one whose heart had not yet turned to stone was the Buddha
statue of Bamiyan. With all his grandeur, he felt humiliated by the
enormity of this tragedy and broke down. Buddha's state of
needlessness and calmness became ashamed before a nation in need of
bread. Buddha shattered to inform the world of all this poverty,
ignorance, oppression and mortality. But negligent humanity heard only
about the demolition of the Buddha statue. I reached the conclusion
that the statue of Buddha was not demolished by anybody; it fell down
out of shame. Out of shame for the world's ignorance towards
Afghanistan.
• Kandahar is at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh, on August 15 and the
LumiĺŔre, Edinburgh, on August 20. Box office: 0131-228 4051.
sirkn...@earthlink.net
thank you.
Habshi wrote:
> Lumiוְre, Edinburgh, on August 20. Box office: 0131-228 4051.
demivolt
Does anyone know if this movie is going to get around to North
America?