Kandahar (Film)

2001. Dir: Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Produced by Makhmalbaf Productions with French companies Bac Films and Studio Canal.


Context:









The Film:
"In Kandahar, as in Makhmalbaf's other recent films, actors play roles that approximate their own lives. Nelofer Paizira, an Afghan expatriate and writer of the story on which the film is based, plays Nafas. She returns to Afghanistan to save a sister, who is threatening to commit suicide before a solar eclipse, symbolising the impending eclipse of Afghan women's lives. As Nafas travels towards Kandahar, a destination she never reaches, she witnesses multifarious ills plaguing Afghan society under the Taliban following decades of intertribal warfare and the Great Powers' imperial exploits. Bandits, fraudsters and scavengers seize advantage of the breakdown in law and order. Innocent lives are wrecked by landmines: in a typically surreal image, Makhmalbaf shows a horde of landmine-maimed amputees hopping on crutches towards a supply of artificial limbs parachuting down from a Red Cross helicopter. In other remarkable images, women clothed head to foot in brightly coloured burkas move in groups across the desert"







Reception:
Kandahar premiered at Cannes in 2001 and drew sellout crowds in Europe and the USA in the immediate aftermath of September 11th. Its general release could not have been more timely: America was preparing to go to war; names of Afghan locations like Kandahar were on everyone's lips. It was even rumoured that President Bush wished to see it.


References:
Chaudhuri, Contemporary World Cinema, 81.