In less troubled times the release of a new film by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf or a film series focusing on the plight of children in the Middle East would draw slight if well-intended attention. But these days Americans are, of necessity, showing an unwonted interest in the Arab world. And so the timing seems perfect for Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar (2001; screens January 10 at 8 p.m.), which kicks off the Harvard Film Archive’s "Children of the Arab World" series tonight before opening tomorrow at the Kendall Square. No one who’s watched CNN lately will have to ask what the title refers to.
How long will this interest last? Well, if ever a film had legs, it’s Kandahar. They come streaming down from the blazing Afghan desert sky on parachutes, prostheses dropped by the Red Cross, and desperate mobs of legless wretches on crutches race to grab one. For such images alone (and you have to ask yourself, how many takes did the director require before he was satisfied?), this film should be seen — as well, of course, for its blunt portrait of life under a fanatical, fundamentalist regime.
Yet judged by other cinematic criteria like character, plot, and performances, Kandahar comes off a bit lacking. At the heart of its quandary is the question of fact or fiction. It’s based on the true story of Nelofer Pazira, who with her family fled Afghanistan as a girl and is now a journalist in Canada. Worried about the fate of a female friend she had left behind, she asked Makhmalbaf to help find her. He was unable to do so then, but a year later he proposed to make a film about the situation, asking Pazira to star as a character based on herself named Nafas, and changing her friend into her sister, who is not only a victim of oppression but has been maimed in a landmine accident. To add further suspense and melodrama, Makhmalbaf has Nafas’s sister send her a letter stating that she has decided to end her life on the last eclipse of the 20th century — in three days’ time.
Except as a recurring image — Kandahar opens and closes with a chilling shot of a blacked-out sun and its shimmering corona — these plot devices only distract one from the unearthly spectacle of Afghan reality (actually, the film is shot in a border region between Afghanistan and Iran inhabited by Afghan refugees) that Makhmalbaf’s camera discloses. The fate of the endangered "sister" seems more a MacGuffin than a compelling motivation. In part this is due to its contrivance; in part it’s due to Pazira’s limitations as an actress. She is most effective when covered with a burka; her journalistic asides into a tape recorder are portentous and banal.
In general, though, the people, places, and things Nafas encounters along the way are far more astonishing than any filmmaker with an agenda could invent. At his best, Makhmalbaf evokes the Luis Buñuel of Un chien andalou and Land Without Bread, allowing neither surrealism for its own sake nor pedantic political correctness to dominate the poetic truth of the images. When untampered with, they enact a dance of concealment, illusion, and startling metamorphosis.
Nafas and Makhmalbaf serve best as passive observers. Like a latter-day Dorothy in Oz or Alice in Wonderland, Nafas negotiates her way through scenes of stark absurdity, finding help in unlikely places. She disguises herself as one of the wives of a crusty old Afghan and observes as her colleagues secretly apply make-up under their all-concealing burkas. At a refugee camp, teachers instruct children to avoid any dolls and stuffed animals they might find — invariably these are booby-trapped with mines. Crossing the desert in a tiny, brightly colored three-wheeled truck, the extended family get waylaid by bandits, and Nafas seeks help from Khak (Sadou Teymouri), a young scamp kicked out of a religious school ("What is a Kalashnikov?" is one of the questions posed to those boys studying to become a mullah) who can’t understand why she won’t buy the ring he pilfered from a corpse in the desert. Falling ill from bad water, Nafas seeks help from Hassan Tantaï (Tabib Sahid), a "doctor" who must, according to Taliban rules, treat her through a hole in a drape and who turns out to have secrets hidden under veils of his own. More secrets, perhaps, than even Makhmalbaf knew about: there’s evidence that Sahid, the actor who played Tantaï, may be an American terrorist who assassinated an anti-Khomeini activist in the United States some 20 years ago and then fled to Iran.
Truth is indeed stranger than fictionalized truth, and perhaps a future Makhmalbaf movie might spring from Sahid’s tale. If Mohsen doesn’t make it, then maybe his daughter Samira will. Her debut film, The Apple (1998; January 17 and January 18 at 7 p.m. and January 19 at 9 p.m.), is one of the highlights of "Children of the Arab World."
It, too, is based on a true story, this one closer to home. In a case that shocked the city, a pair of 11-year-old twin girls in Tehran were found to have been locked up their entire lives by their dotty fundamentalist parents. Iran being a more lenient Islamic theocracy than that of the Taliban, a determined social worker brings the girls out of their domestic prison, Kaspar Hauser–like, and into a society that may or may not be more liberated. Only 18 when she made the film (her father co-wrote the screenplay), Makhmalbaf brings a shrewd irony (the actual participants in the story play themselves), a raw visual poetry, and an ingenuous compassion to this cinéma-vérité fable of oppression and freedom, of cultural conflict and change.
For children as well as women, the dominant condition in the Middle East appears to be imprisonment. Images of Dickensian child labor haunt the makers of the documentary Up at Dawn: The Working Children of Egypt (2000; January 15 at 7 p.m. and January 17 at 9 p.m.). Unfortunately, the censor attached to their crew by the Egyptian government didn’t allow them to capture any of these images on film, so instead Canadian directors John Zado and David Rountree spend a lot of time talking to various experts who discuss the problem of children’s being exploited in sweatshops posing as art schools (better they should be enlisted by terrorist organizations?), as well as the more general problem of Arab uneasiness at having their societies and culture depicted by the Western media.
Such depictions don’t seem to be much more candid when done by Arab filmmakers, to judge from Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri’s Frontiers of Dreams and Fears (2001; January 12 at 7 p.m.). An hour-long made-for-TV documentary, it records the long-distance relationship between two young Palestinian refugee girls, one living in the infamous Shatila camp in Lebanon, the other in the Al-Dheisha camp in Bethlehem. After communicating by e-mail and letters, the two meet at the Israel-Lebanon border — just before the occupied territory erupts into the bloody chaos of the Intifada. The violence comes as a shock, both because of Masri’s guileless and graceless filmmaking (though with moments of brilliance, as when kids discuss the appeal of Xena) and the girls’ resilient innocence and optimism; given such material, a filmmaker with more acuity and skill might have made a powerful documentary.
As did Justine Shapiro, B.Z. Goldberg, and Carlos Bolado with Promises (2001; January 19 at 7 p.m.). Screened earlier this year as part of the Boston Jewish Film Festival, the film takes a premise similar to that of Masri’s Frontiers, but it raises the stakes. Goldberg befriends seven children from different backgrounds — Jewish and Palestinian, from Israeli nationalists to supporters of Hamas — over a period of several years in Jerusalem. His goal is to bring together some of the Jewish and Palestinian kids to initiate some kind of communication, if not reconciliation. The results are mixed; by the end, the film’s title appears both bittersweet in its irony and urgent in its appeal.
Like Makhmalbaf, Lebanese documentarian Jean Khalil Chamoun uses fiction to get behind the veil of fact in his debut feature, In the Shadows of the City (2000; January 12 at 8:30 p.m.) And as in Kandahar, reality overwhelms invention. In this case, the reality is 15 years of recent Lebanese history, which includes invasions, massacres, and an internecine civil war all seen from the point of view of Rami, who is first introduced as a 12-year-old refugee from the war-ravaged south whose family have relocated to Beirut. There he makes friends with other street kids, whose eccentricities and shifting loyalties grow more sinister as they become gun-toting adults.
Chamoun doesn’t try to analyze the politics behind the bloodletting — it’s almost impossible to determine which side is which — but he does attempt to make a case for individual responsibility and multi-cultural tolerance. The uneven cast doesn’t always help out, and what sticks in the mind is not the admirable humanism of Chamoun’s fiction but the film’s images of inhumanity — war, carnage, and apocalyptic destruction — taken from documentary fact.
