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 on the day of the impending eclipse. When the film begins, the eclipse is just three days away, and Nafas, who begins her journey in Iran, spends much of the film pleading with local Afghans to guide her to Kandahar, where her sister lives. Along the way, Nafas records her thoughts onto a tape for her sister and peers at the barren scenery from behind the embroidered veil of her burqa. She enters the country disguised as one of an old man's four wives, and at one point, he complains that she dishonors him by lifting her veil too often. When the man and his family are robbed and turn back, Nafas hires a boy named Khak (Sadou Teymouri) to take her closer to her sister's home.

Makhmalbaf uses this journey to explore the oppressive social realities that faced both women and men in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The wives of Nafas's first guide share makeup and jewelry, but even among themselves, each woman applies her cosmetics in secret, under the head-to-toe covering of her burqa. Women who need medical attention are examined through a curtain with a tiny hole that is barely big enough for the physician to shine a light in the woman's eye or place a depressor on her tongue—and when the doctor tells his patient to say "ah," he does not speak to her directly, but gives the message to her child, who sits at the edge of the curtain and repeats everything that both sides say. When Nafas herself becomes ill, she finds to her surprise that the nearest village doctor, Tabib Sahib (Hassan Tantai), is an African American who initially came to Afghanistan to join the fight against the Russians. He, too, must wear a disguise; although he cannot grow a beard, the law says he must have one, so he glues an artificial set of whiskers to his chin.

Everywhere Nafas goes, she is surrounded by reminders of the violence that has plagued her native land. A girl reminds her not to pick up any dolls that she finds on the ground, because they might be rigged to explode. Boys in school learn to describe the destructive power of sabres and Kalashnikovs as though they were reciting passages from the Qur'an. And of course, there are the many amputees who have been wounded by the land mines left over from the wars in Afghanistan. Nafas's last guide is a man who lost his forearm; when the Red Cross workers tell him they don't have any prosthetic hands, he hectors them into giving him a pair of legs instead. The film's most distinctive image may be the sight of one-legged men hopping on crutches across a lunar landscape to retrieve the prosthetic limbs dropped by parachute.

Makhmalbaf's films have often been a mix of fiction and documentary. Salaam Cinema (1995) is essentially one long screen test, in which a stream of would-be actors respond to Makhmalbaf's casting call and he prods them into various forms of action, goading them in a manner that at times seems cruel. Around that time, a retired police officer asked Makhmalbaf if he could act in the director's next project—and Makhmalbaf recognized the would-be actor as one of the men who had arrested him for taking part in a demonstration against the Shah some 20 years earlier, when Makhmalbaf was a teen. The result of this coincidental meeting was A Moment of Innocence (1996), in which Makhmalbaf both re-creates the moment of his arrest and depicts his attempts to make a film about it, with the officer's help.

Kandahar, too, is rooted in real life. Like the character she plays, Pazira was born in Afghanistan and is now a graduate student in journalism in Canada; the story was inspired by a letter she received from a childhood friend who said life under the Taliban was no longer worth living. Similarly, Tantai is an American convert to Islam who fought the Russians in Afghanistan; in an interview with Iranian critic Jahanbakhsh Nouraei in Film International Quarterly, he said he became a Muslim because Islam's teachings on fighting back made more sense to him than Christianity's emphasis on turning the other cheek. Makhmalbaf scouted the country in secret before writing the script, and he allowed his cast of nonactors, some of whom were themselves refugees from Afghanistan, to improvise. This technique can work to the film's detriment, as the dialogue sometimes seem a little stiff or redundant, but it does give the film an authenticity that would be lacking in most Western productions.

The film's treatment of religion is somewhat complicated, as one might expect from a director who has made his own journey from militancy. Makhmalbaf was once so opposed to movies that he stopped talking to his mother because she went to them. He began his career making Muslim propaganda films such as Fleeing from Evil to God (1984), and his early features, which expressed his concern for the oppressed, disturbed Western audiences otherwise sympathetic to his message because his social critiques were rooted in a fundamentalist worldview. However, as he matured as an artist, his films became more nuanced; at least two were banned by the Iranian government. Nor have the authorities in Iran appreciated his ongoing attention to the fate of Afghan refugees there, the subject of his 1987 film, The Cyclist.

In Kandahar he exposes the dark side of faith, which some people use to justify their hatred and violence, but he also suggests the more positive role faith can play. Tabib Sahib admits that, although the civil wars in Afghanistan have disillusioned him, he is still searching for God, and he does this now not by killing his enemies but by helping others through their misery. Somewhere between these clear alternatives is the more troubling image of Nafas's first guide, who stands off to the side and chants praises to God while bandits rifle through his family's belongings.

It is possible to see the old man's praise as an ineffectual habit or a pitifully impotent defense against the shock of violation. Seen thus, piety amounts to nothing more than weakness and self-delusion. But the old man's prayer may also be taken as a genuine cry of gratitude even in the midst of suffering, expressing thankfulness that he and his family are still alive and confidence in God's ultimate justice.

What's not in doubt is Makhmalbaf's anger and despair at the suffering and the bleak absurdity everywhere in view in Afghanistan, a misery that cries out for relief.

Peter T. Chattaway lives in Canada and writes about movies.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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