Jan/Feb 2002

ARTICLE TOOLS

Find similar articles E-mail this page

There haven't been all that many films about Afghanistan. In the waning days of the Reagan era, when the mountains and deserts of that country proved as difficult for the Soviets as the jungles of Vietnam had been for the Americans, the land of the mujahideen was seen as a sort of mythic battlefield where Western agents like Rambo and James Bond could flex their heroic muscles in the name of freedom. A 1988 release, The Beast, showed Russian soldiers doubting the purpose of the brutal campaign. But for the most part, the image-makers of the West simply haven't been interested.

When Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf set out to make a film about the plight of Afghanistan under the Taliban, he could hardly have foreseen the circumstances under which it would be seen. Kandahar, which won the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival, is an eye-opening look at the stifling conditions under which most Afghans have lived in recent years, and it provides an essential bit of background to the conflict that now rages there. Believing the title was too obscure to lure English-speaking audiences, the film's distributors initially planned to call it The Sun Behind the Moon for its release in the West, reflecting the fact that one of its central metaphors is a solar eclipse: the film begins by juxtaposing this image with that of a woman's face obscured under the shadow of her burqa. But the city after which the film is named is no longer unfamiliar to Western audiences.

Kandahar follows Nafas (Nelofer Pazira), an Afghan refugee turned Canadian journalist and political activist, as she sneaks back into the country of her birth in an attempt to prevent the suicide of her little sister, who has written that she intends to kill herself ...