film review by Jon Reinsch

Afghanistan through Iranian Eyes

Kandahar

opens January 11 at Broadway Market Cinemas, Seattle

Baran

opens in February (theater to be determined)

Director Majid Majidi is best known for films about children: The Color of Paradise and Children of Heaven. The main character in his new Baran is a shiftless and hot-headed Iranian teenager named Lateef. This unlikely hero’s job is to prepare meals for the workers at a construction site—many of whom are Afghan refugees, working illegally. At first indifferent to the plight of these desperately poor people, a discovery leads him to care deeply about one of them.

The genesis of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar was a 1987 documentary he made about Afghan refugees in Iran. Having seen the film, an Afghan expatriate named Nelofer Pazira sought Makhmalbaf’s help when a friend, still in Afghanistan, wrote of her despair. Eventually, Makhmalbaf decided to make a film based on Pazira’s situation, in which the protagonist Nafas struggles to get to Kandahar before her sister can carry out a threat to kill herself during a solar eclipse. Going deeper and deeper into Afghanistan, Nafas speaks her thoughts into a recorder. The purpose? Perhaps she, like Makhmalbaf, is a kind of documentarian.

Makhmalbaf cast Pazira herself in the role of Nafas. This way of melding fact and fiction is characteristic of one branch of Iranian cinema. Recall, for example, Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up, about a man who had impersonated Makhmalbaf; in this film the real-life impostor plays himself. Or the masterful A Moment of Innocence, about an incident from Makhmalbaf’s revolutionary youth in which he attacked a policeman. Makhmalbaf cast the now middle-aged ex-cop as himself. Both Kandahar and Baran avoid the use of professional actors, and one senses that this is more than a cost-saving measure.

In Baran, the drab work site and harsh winter environment contrast with the colors that abound among the Afghans. Sandwiching many shots between blue skies and brown earth, Kandahar is equally colorful, but the imagery is comparatively spare and enigmatic. Thus, there’s a wedding procession of women who, in spite of their song and their colorful burqas, seem almost ghostly. But more than anything else, I appreciated this film’s musicality. There is meaning in its prominence: these are people of a deeply musical tendency, forbidden to give it expression.

With the Taliban gone, are these films outdated? Not likely. The sudden lowering of a burqa over a face is Baran’s most devastating image, while in Kandahar the mandatory burqa is made akin to an eclipse of the sun, darkening the world. Today, a few burqas have been cast off, but a permanent improvement in women’s status is far from certain in a society where power is shared by elements of the Northern Alliance, with its history of rape. Kandahar makes repeated reference to Afghans maimed by land mines; with thousands of unexploded American cluster bomblets now strewn across the country, this problem is likely to worsen.

Poverty is central to both films. Baran’s Lateef is a bit of a hustler; someone says that “when he sees money, his tongue hangs out.” Compared to the refugees, though, he’s doing well. Kandahar’s Nafas dangles American dollars before prospective guides. One is a young boy who, having scavenged a ring from a skeleton, insists that Nafas buy it; “it matches your eyes.” And when a boy is expelled from the mullah school, his mother is advised to send him to work in Iran. Recent events have only swelled the refugee ranks, so this desperation to get money, in any way possible, will not have lessened.

These films seem aimed at somewhat different audiences; one strives to raise the consciousness of Iranians, one of westerners. The insensitive Lateef at the beginning of Baran may represent a criticism of some of Majidi’s countrymen, with Lateef’s transformation indicating hope for their awakening. As for Kandahar, it’s striking how many westerners appear in the film: the now-Canadian Nafas, an American “doctor”, and two European Red Cross workers. Much of the film is in English. So Makhmalbaf’s didactic intent comes as no surprise. He says “I was using the means of cinema in order to inform the world of a tragedy.”

The recent upsurge of interest in Islam is all well and good, but it would be nice if it didn’t take horrifying acts of terrorism to get people to care about what goes on in other parts of the world. Watching films like these is a humanizing experience; it is harder to rejoice in the dropping of bombs when you’ve identified with the people “on the ground”—even if only by way of a two-dimensional screen.•