Kandahar-traversing terrains of hopelessness for hope!!!

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.

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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.

The Silence-a soulful ballad

THE SILENCE
Directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Color bubbles are all around. Hues of bright blue, emerald green, orange,turquoise, all in different shapes and pattern appearing sometimes on the fabric of the loose flowing Tajik tunics worn by the women in the streets and sometimes in their beautiful colored head-scarves, bright red skirts, merry red cherries, the clear blue sky all woven together creating a sumptuous visual treat. And this is also the world experienced by blind 10 year old Khorshid, a kid from an impoverished family in Tajikistan, gifted with a taste of good music.
Sounds are the only way Khorshid makes a sense of the world around him. He works as an apprentice for an old man, tuning musical instruments, earning a meagre salary and helping his mother to make ends meet. However, Khorshid is constantly distracted away through music and sounds and is almost every day late at work. The owner is angry with him. Also lurks over his head is the threat of eviction, for being unable to pay rents. However, Khorshid is too busy to slip into his surreal world, drowned by the sounds which appeal to him. Even efforts by his friends to shut the music away from his ears by plugging them with cotton pods fail. Since music is in his soul and he traverses all obstacles to listen to the calls of his soul.
Hence, you never feel pity for Khorshid’s blindness and his impoverished background. Rather you get intoxicated in the beautiful world he creates around himself through his love for music and sounds. He often follows strangers too lured by their music. Even the daily summons by the land-lord is cue enough for him to make notes of his symphony (and this da-da-da-dum are indeed the first four notes of Beethoven’s 5th symphony). Khorshid is eager to erase the ugliness of his landlord’s greedy knocks everyday banging on his door. Rather he is eager to create a symphony out of these incorporating all the apparent dull and drudgerous activities of hammering utensils and making pots and pans.
Young beautiful Nadereh is loving and affectionate towards Khorshid. An orphan and under the care of Khorshid’s boss, she is keen to protect Khorshid’s musical world from getting shattered by the harsh rebukes of his master. She therefore is always eager to shield and cover him and at times even indulgent in Khorshid’s transcendences into his musical world and absence from work. It seems Khorshid is Nadereh’s sole confidante with whom she can share her heart and her worries. With Khorshid, Nadereh too tries to transcend over her mundane existence and tries to match nature’s beauty. She dances in Balinese style hanging cherries from her ears and placing flower petals on her fingernails. She even indulges herself in the narcissism of viewing herself on the mirror. Blind Khorshid though blind seems to be perceptive of Nadereh‘s beauty. The internal chemistry between these two young children is also an intelligent hint to the taboos the Iranian film-makers suffer when showing man-woman relationships and intimacy. There are therefore the soulful images of showing mirrors and one face hovering vertically over the other, and picking up the pieces bearing the image of the other. The next scenes are more pronounced with Khorshid sinking exhausted onto the grass bed and the yellow leaves softly blanketing him, while Nadereh rushes back to work.
Images and music are extremely explosive and poignant throughout the film which seems to speak only through the metaphors of images. Hence Khorshid’s mother eviction accompanied by a large mirror reflecting the nature and the sun-ray’s (Khorshid means the sun) is effervescent with emotions and hopes of a poor who if not everything can at least possess the beauty of nature. Khorshid in the meantime, asks the folk musicians to play the galloping tune and he becomes as if Pegasus, trying to shed off all the drudgeries of his poverty-striven life and galloping towards a musical future rich with tunes, rhythm and symphonies.
The Silence seems to be lyrical journey signifying life’s joys amidst the nature and its pain from the unnaturally imposed constraints and restrictions on the human soul. Khorshid suffers continuously throughout the movie to get rid of the dilemma of choosing a dull constricted life away from music or the one which is truly liberated, a world of extreme enchantment amidst the symphonies of the passing sounds and voices. His penchant for liberation of the soul become symbolic in a gorgeous sequence where Khorshid staggers through a rainstorm on a beach carrying a waterlogged instrument that he is suppose to return to his mean boss. The instrument moans as it is destroyed by the elements and then Khorshid liberated, abandons the instrument on the beach to free it from its burden of patronage in wrong hands.
In an interview with Mamad Haghighat, Makhmalbaf talks about his passage from realism to surrealism and when discussing The Silence he says that Khorshid sacrifices the past and the future to live in the moment and the director sees his character as a type of artist. The director goes on to say that life happens in a succession of moments and not in a structured story, yet in this string of moments, Makhmalbaf has created a universal story.
Silence also brings forth the memories of Majidi’s Mohammad from colors of Paradise and which also shows the liberation of Mohammad’s soul and his happiness through his intense gifted sensitivity of the nature and natural being around him.
Tajikistan in 1998 (the year the movie got made) has just come out of a 5 year long ethnic strife and civil war (1992 to 1997). Inflation was soaring high and economically the country was devastated with many leaving the country for Russia for a better future. Almost everywhere the children were working to manage a living. However, these facts though come forth in the movie take a back-seat never arouse pity. Rather e landscapes and visuals resplendent with the whirling colourful skirts of the Tajik women, their brightly patterned head-scarves, the mirror-like streams holding the stunning natural beauty as a permanent reflection we hear a story of hope for a better future with liberated soul free from burden of impositions and bans.