[Nettime-bold] Film: Kandahar

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>]

   It's her story, and suddenly Kandahar has become
> the most politically
> important movie in the world. Nelofer Pazira talks
> to Aida Edemariam
> 
>   Guardian
> 
>   Friday October 26, 2001
> 
>   She'd been worried by the tone of her best
> friend's letters for a while,
> but in April 1998 Nelofer Pazira received one that
> sent her straight to the
> Afghan border. Dyana had written that Nelofer should
> live for both of them;
> her own life in Kabul, under Taliban rule, was no
> longer worth living.
> Pazira, worried that Dyana intended to kill herself,
> came all the way from
> Canada to stop her. Kandahar, the most recent film
> by director Mohsen
> Makhmalbaf, is based on her story, and Pazira, a
> Canadian student and
> documentary-maker, is its star.
> 
>   Set - but not shot  in Afghanistan, Kandahar had
> already been awarded the
> Ecumenical Jury prize at Cannes when the World Trade
> Centre attacks made
> Afghanistan the country everybody suddenly wanted to
> know about. Kandahar
> has since been sold to over 40 countries, and held
> the top screen average
> at the Italian box office thisweek - ahead of AI and
> Moulin Rouge - and on
> Monday President George Bush made an urgent request
> for a screening.
> 
>   Pazira has spoken at screenings all over the
> world, and it's been
> reported that she is a Unesco candidate for the post
> of cultural ambassador
> to Afghanistan.
> 
>   Nelofer Pazira (her first name means "water lily,"
> her surname "to
> accept") lives with her parents in a nondescript
> suburb of Ottawa. She's
> confident, intense, a fast and highly articulate
> talker. Her accent sounds
> like it might be French, but she doesn't speak much
> of Canada's second
> language;  her first language is Dari (a version of
> Farsi), she also speaks
> Urdu and  learned English in 1991.
> 
>   Pazira grew up in the middle-class Sharenow
> neighbourhood of Kabul, where
> her father was a doctor and her mother taught
> Persian literature, and where
> Dyana also lived. "[President Najibullah's communist
> regime] was, for me,
> what the Taliban seems to be for some people,
> because at that time my
> father would frequently be sent to jail for his
> outspokenness against the
> government," she says. "You couldn't say anything."
> 
>   By 1989, when Nelofer was 16, they'd had enough.
> The family walked for 10
> days into Pakistan, where they stayed for a year
> before ending up in
> Moncton, New Brunswick. Dyana was one of the few who
> knew about their
> leaving, and she and Nelofer kept in touch for the
> next nine years. While
> Nelofer got a degree in English and journalism, and
> then embarked on a
> masters, Dyana trained as an economist and worked in
> a bank until she,
> along with all other Afghan women, was sent home for
> good, and sank into
> depression.
> 
>   Receiving Dyana's final letter made her "quite
> desperate," says Nelofer.
> She'd been to Iran before, to do field work in the
> Afghan refugee camps,
> and remembered a family she'd met then. "They said
> they were willing and
> happy to help me," and they did cross the border
> into Afghanistan briefly,
> except that - and this is said in exactly the same
> level, unsurprised tone
> - "their family members were being tortured by the
> Taliban at that moment."
> Forced to look for aid elsewhere, she thought of
> Mohsen Makhmalbaf; she'd
> been impressed by the sympathy for Afghan refugees
> displayed in his 1987
> film  The Cyclist, and went to see him.
> Unfortunately, he knew almost
> nothing about Afghanistan. Stymied again, she
> returned to Canada.
> 
>   Over a year later, Makhmalbaf tracked her down and
> asked her to come back
> to Iran immediately, he needed her help on a film.
> He'd adapted her story
> slightly: a Canadian journalist goes to rescue her
> sister, a landmine
> victim in Kandahar who has threatened suicide on the
> last eclipse of the
> millennium. Pazira went, and was amazed at how much
> Makhmalbaf had learned
> about Afghanistan in the interval; he'd even taken a
> secret, eye-opening
> trip into the country. For two and a half months
> they filmed in the small
> refugee village of Niatak on the Iranian border,
> along what they soon
> discovered was a dangerous smuggler's route through
> the desert. The sand
> dunes would not look out of place in Lawrence of
> Arabia, but they are only
> three years old; wheat used to grow there, and a
> river has left only a path
> of white marble.
> 
>   Apart from Pazira, the cast consists of villagers,
> which made for a
> couple of problems. First, "they didn't have proper
> drinking water and they
> didn't have electricity andeverybody was sick." So
> Pazira and Makhmalbaf
> commandeered a doctor and distributed medicine. One
> of the women they found
> starving - she's notill, said the doctors, just give
> her food - became a
> character in Kandahar. There are very few films
> involving Afghanistan -
> some Russian and Mojahedin propaganda flicks, Rambo
> III, the James Bond
> film The Living Daylights and The Cyclist - and TV,
> movies and hotography
> are banned in Afghanistan, anyway. The locals had
> never seen a film, so
> Makhmalbaf set up a screening room and showed them
> what moving pictures
> were all about.
> 
>   Then, when they were finally ready to start, their
> cast balked. Three
> different tribes who had lived separated by
> mountains in Afghanistan now
> lived in the same small village. They wouldn't speak
> to each other. And the
> women could not be filmed without their burkas and
> their husbands. For
> hours each morning, Pazira -whose command of Dari
> was invaluable - and
> Makhmalbaf went from house to house reassuring their
> jittery cast members.
> Vigilante groups operating nearby meant they had to
> change location daily,
> and Makhmalbaf disguised himself as a local.
> 
>   There's a great scene in Kandahar in which two
> women, entirely enveloped
> in black burkas, share a tube of lipstick and a
> mirror. The outside world
> may not be able to see the results, but they're
> determined. Pazira, a
> practising Muslim, wears a burka throughout the
> film. She'd worn one
> before, but only occasionally. "Of course, you
> cannot breathe. That was
> my  first reaction." (Her character is called Nafas,
> "to breathe.") Burkas
> are light, but unmanageable; you can't see your
> feet, and Pazira kept
> tripping over. "But as the time went by, I got used
> to it. Then one day we
> were walking in the desert, there were a few guys
> standing watching. I
> pulled it down. I said to myself, 'What an idiot you
> are! Why are you doing
> this? Nobody's forcing you to cover your face.' So I
> put it up again, and a
> few more steps and a few more people looking and I
> pulled it down. It was
> then I realised what apsychologically damaging thing
> it is, because it
> makes you feel incompetent. You lose your
> self-confidence. And you don't
> have to think about your identity any more."
> 
>   Which is, of course, exactly the effect the
> Taliban intend: Pazira has
> interviewed senior Taliban officials on their ideas
> about women for a film.
> "They feel, sincerely, that women are weak creatures
> who need to be
> protected. Although they have been given rights by
> God, it's the man who
> has to delegate those rights. Women are good as
> mothers and wives. They
> told me that the value of a woman is like a thousand
> rupee note that is
> very precious and they want to tuck it in their
> shirt and keep it
> underneath instead of putting it in a surface
> pocket."
> 
>   Makhmalbaf and Pazira were determined that there
> would be no violence in
> Kandahar, but the film is saturated in the results
> of violence, "even the
> games are violent." One of the unnerving things
> Makhmalbaf has caught is
> how, in a country that allows almost no kind of
> relaxation, games and
> menace intertwine. Girls are taught not to pick up
> dolls, as they might be
> landmines; plastic legs drift down from relief
> helicopters by parachute,
> men on crutches lurch towards them in a grim
> three-legged race. Pazira
> tells of an Afghan men's game called buzkashi. It's
> rather like polo -
> horseriders vie for a dead goat soaked in water -
> but with a particularly
> Afghan twist: you play as an individual, against
> everyone else.
> 
>   It's the individual plight that Kandahar
> highlights, not the political.
> Makhmalbaf has said that he wanted to make the film
> because "Afghanistan
> barely exists" to the rest of the world. But that
> was before September 11.
> "I feel that the film has found a different meaning
> now," says Pazira, "now
> that the world has paid attention, the context in
> which Afghanistan should
> be understood is lacking." She is passionately
> against the bombing and
> believes that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who are
> fighting proxy wars in
> Afghanistan with India and Iran respectively, should
> simply have been asked
> to stop arming the Taliban.
> 
>   A year ago she discovered that Dyana was still
> alive, but since then
> there has been silence. Pazira would like to get
> back to her master's
> thesis (it's on Afghan women refugees and how the
> dynamic between husband
> and wife changes when the man can no longer
> provide). But for now she feels
> she has an important role to play, explaining
> Afghanistan and making sure
> people take away from the film the humanitarian idea
> that Afghans are
> barred from basic cultural and economic advances,
> devastated and tired of war.
> 
>   · Kandahar is released on November 16.


=====
“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it s
eeks to destroy.  Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.  Through violence you may murder t
he liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.  Through violence you murder the h
ater, but you do not murder hate.  In fact, violence merely increases hate…Returning violence for v
iolence multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.  Darkness ca
nnot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate:  Only love can do tha
t.”

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