KANDAHAR
Directed by: - Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Plot Summary:-
Nafas (Niloufer Pazira) is an Afghan born Canadian reporter. Years back to escape the atrocities of the war which has scarred Afghanistan every now and then, she moved to Canada. Her sister, while the escape got injured by a land-mine and hence stayed back with her father. Nafas has received a letter from her sister, where she has admitted that before the last solar eclipse of the century, she would commit suicide. To save her sister from the grips of depression and suicide, Nafas takes onto herself to travel to Kandahar. The movie is based on Nafas’ journey in search of her sister amidst the difficult and risky terrains of Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
The plot is partly based on a true incident where the Canadian journalist Niloufer Pazira, had sought Mohsen’s help to reach out to a friend of her at Afghanistan under the Taliban rule.
Kandahar undoubtedly brings out a vivid picture of the plight of men and women in the poverty stricken, war-torn Afghanistan under the fundamentalist Taliban dominance. But above all it is predominantly a story of “hope”, “courage”, and “love”. Kandahar is a poignant tale which tells that amidst all the darkness of war and oppression, it is sheer love amidst the fellow human beings which keep civilizations alive and going.
************************************************************************************
What is your idea about Afghanistan? Or rather what are the first images which come to your mind whenever you hear the name “Afghanistan”? Almost a majority would think of the twin towers crumbling down. In the recent past no visual has been string enough to scar human minds for ever other than the attack on the twin towers. And that has also sealed Afghanistan’s identity of a overtly fundamentalist, oppressive Taliban regime.
Somehow, although made just prior to the 9-11 debacle Makhmalbaf‘s Kandahar will be able to provide you with stronger visual idea of the terrain viz. “Afghanistan”
Kandahar undoubtedly (a few scenes secretly shot at Afghanistan) hints at the dangerous Taliban dominance and the plight of women in Afghanistan. But somehow that is not the predominant appeal or tone of the movie.
Rather this movie captures the strong overtones of “HOPE”.
Hope is what Nafas wants to pass on to her sister who has lost the urge to live.
She feels that the pains she is taking to traverse those very landscapes she had once abandoned amidst the dangers and challenges would be able to revive her sister. May be in this lone world she will get back her hope of being loved.
Nafas is stunned by the oppressions the Afghan women face. They are nameless, faceless identities. Cordoned within the long flowing burqas they are just “siasers” or black heads. However they have not been completely ripped off their hope to live. They paint their nails and lips; deck their wrists with colourful lacquer bangles, all under the secrecy of the burqa.
The movie starts with the images of the solar eclipse (the period of diamond ring) viewed under the burqa. Throughout the movie, Nafas is almost racing against the sun. There are three days for solar eclipse and Nafas needs to reach her sister before that. The eclipse may be is the time when the sun will be engulfed, the end of hope for both Nafas and her sister.
Nafas bribes several people to reach Kandahar prior to that time. Throughout her way she ensembles her feelings and experiences in her tape recorder.
Her travel experiences through the Taliban corridors of Afghanistan to Kandahar is presented as an extraordinarily rich visual collation of conflicting ideas of tragic beauty and hope amidst sheer despair all around.
The sight of women veiled from head to toe in multicoloured burqas set against the backdrop of yellow sand and the orange sun disappearing fast from the western crimson sky gives a sense of beauty juxtaposed amidst the irony of captivity and oppression. The array of colors we see as women gather together and form a stunning image of reds, yellows and blues as Makhmalbaf utilizes the head to toe burqa as an image not just of ready oppression but a pictorial richness we can almost gorge on.
On the other hand the Madrasa where several young children roll back and forth reciting Quran and diligently learning the know-hows of the Kalashnikov, gives you a feeling of ultimate despair. Moreover, getting enrolled into the Madrasa is not a choice but a compulsion to earn a life from the clutches of death. The other way is only to migrate for menial jobs to Iran.
One of the encounters with an African American quack leads Nafas to a Red-Cross camp. The camp is crowded by crippled Afghan men, who have lost their hands or limbs in the land-mines are waiting for the prosthetic limbs to arrive.
The men haggle with the doctors bargaining about an extra limb out of turn, or rejecting the limb for their wife as being too un-womanly.
The women never come to the camp for getting their limbs or measurement. The men choose it for them.
However, the prosthetic limbs donot steal away hopes from the hearts of the Afghan men. Hence to still make his wife look feminine and petite, to enable her to wear her bridal slippers, one Afghan selects another pair of prosthetic limbs than the one given by the Camp-doctor. He even veils the legs and hold them close to him, seeing for the prosthetic limbs when implanted on his wife would make her look. The man in his utter act of non-sense, also somehow tells that how amidst the daily drudgeries of tragedy, life still goes on and no one has even given up hope.
This is more evidently captured by one of the signature visual moment in the movie. The prosthetic limbs that fall from the sky from the aid planes passing over, as crippled Afghans race towards them, is not an image for pathos, is rather that of pronounced hope to live on. Nafas in one monologue therefore expresses that throughout these Afghan landscapes, she had quite a many revelations and one of them being “hope is the last best ingredient in this world torn by tragedies to live on”. “Hence if a person who has lost his limbs lose a race, that is because of his own doing” May be this would give her sister the courage to gather her hopes.
This urge to cling to hopes and to rise above the atrocities of life and war, was also seen in Ghobadi’ s “Turtles Can fly” which was to show the indomitable spirit of the Turks.
In fact Nafas’ journey to Kandahar racing against the time, is symbolic of the struggle of hope of women against oppression. As stated by Tabib, the hope of the identity-less sia-ser, the woman of Afghanistan is “to be seen one day”. Hence even when veiled they still deck themselves with colors and shades of the forbidden world.
Nafas wants to utter these words of hope to her sister to make her love her life again. The movie ends without giving an idea of whether Nafas is able to reach. However her last words say “I have now got into every prison which has escaped one day for you, my dear sister”.
Thus, Kandahar indeed is a movie about hope, a desperate cry for hope of the people, especially the women, of Afghanistan. Nafas never stops her journey to Kandahar to find her sister; she persists and will not stop until she finds her. A journey of hope, a journey into an unknown world, a journey into deep sadness and hope, the hope of the women of Afghanistan is that one day they will be able to remove their burqas and let the rest of the world finally look at them once and for all.
Finally, coming to the first question, visual image of Afghanistan, post Kandahar has left me with multiple images of Afghanistan. Images of a ravaged nation where crushing poverty and mullah-decreed oppression reigns supreme; but simultaneously, glimpses of humanity and slivers of hope that unexpectedly rise from the ruins of a destroyed nation.
No comments:
Post a Comment