Kandahar: The Movie

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By David Ansen

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During the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan, images were the enemy. Photographs and paintings were considered impure. Needless to say, no movies were allowed to be made. But in 1999 acclaimed Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf shot the urgent, eye-opening film "Kandahar" inside Afghanistan's borders despite death threats. No professional actors were used, and much of the film was improvised. Most members of the cast had never seen a movie. The main character, whose real story inspired the film, is an Afghan-raised Canadian journalist desperate to reach her sister in Kandahar before she kills herself. The movie depicts her odyssey across a physically and morally blighted land.

Makhmalbaf shows us a country that, in his words, "has been vaccinated against modern civilization." We see a school where young boys are taught to praise Kalashnikov rifles. We see a local doctor--who turns out to be a black American searching for God--examine his female patient through a hole in a cloth curtain. We see the skeletons of those dead from famine, and the countless maimed victims of land mines who rush to catch the prosthetic legs that parachute through the skies from Red Cross planes. And we see what it is like to be a woman hidden from sight under the suffocating beauty of a burqa. "Kandahar's" dramaturgy is sometimes awkward, but the surreal power of its images is unforgettable. These lunar landscapes and grotesque visions are as strange and haunting as a science-fiction fantasy. Would that it were.

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