KANDAHAR: Devastating and Heart-Wrenching

I went to see Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film without any preconceived notions, though associations with events known to all of us inevitably come to mind. Kandahar – the spiritual capital of the Taliban. Particularly in the past few months, this name has been repeated in the press and television almost without interruption. War, bombings, victims. Fortunately, this film is not about politics, but about people.

Young Afghan Nafas (Niloufar Pazira), who has been living in Canada for years, learns from a letter from her sister, who is in Afghanistan, that she, despairing of her situation, plans to take her own life during the last solar eclipse of the 20th century. Nafas decides to go to Afghanistan to save her sister – she has three days to reach Kandahar and stop her from committing suicide. She arrives in Iran, where she illegally crosses the Taliban border with a family of Afghan refugees. However, soon a group of bandits deprives the family of their means of transport and all their valuables. Nafas, abandoned by the refugees who turn back towards Iran, is left alone. At the same time, a boy is expelled from a school run by mullahs. For fifty dollars, he agrees to help Nafas get to Kandahar.

No matter how unusual it may sound, Kandahar can be considered a road movie. It has all the attributes of a genre film: a clearly defined goal (to save the sister), a strictly limited amount of time to complete the task (3 days), and, of course, a road, or rather the sandy backroads of Afghanistan. However, anyone who would try to classify it in this way would be mistaken because the film is extraordinary. The quasi-documentary format creates a sense of authenticity, further enhanced by the absence of professional actors. Yet, it is simply a story. A story that not only provokes reflection on the fate of women in jihad-ravaged parts of the world but also makes the average person aware of what human life, or rather miserable existence, looks like in such places. We learn about the world behind the Afghan woman’s burqa, who, deprived of all rights, cannot uncover her face, cannot travel without a man, and cannot even talk to him unless through a third person. We see scenes from the life of a country where people no longer remember the times of peace, and one of the most important possessions is a prosthetic arm or leg, allowing for mere survival. Little girls are instructed not to pick up dolls from the ground because they may be booby-trapped, and death has become as common as daily bread, creeping everywhere like the ubiquitous desert sand.

People have learned to live with it because they had to, because the only alternative is a bullet from an AK-47 rifle, which is self-repeating and kills at long or short distances with continuous or single fire, and every ten-year-old there knows this, as the Taliban mullahs teach them. There is a scene in the film where a helicopter drops prosthetic limbs to a Red Cross camp (incidentally run by Polish doctors). Down below, people are already waiting to claim them – former soldiers, peasants who stepped on ever-present mines, swindlers lured by profit, legless people who often wait a year or longer for their turn to receive a piece of plastic. A race begins, grotesque and tragic at the same time – a race of cripples, a race for prosthetics falling from the sky on parachutes straight into the desert sand. This scene genuinely takes your breath away; it is simultaneously absurd and heart-wrenching. It is probably a more universal image, a metaphorical depiction of a country maimed and distorted by years of war, struggling clumsily, sometimes humorously, but so truly.

One would think that the Iranian director would point out the culprits. After all, it is the Islamic fundamentalists who rule (again) the country, and by imposing Sharia law, they have set it back decades (one of the characters in Kandahar says that the only modern thing in Afghanistan is… weapons). The Taliban have enslaved a country that had a chance to revive after years of war, but they are just one of the many plagues that have struck it. One of the characters – a Muslim born in the United States – comes to Afghanistan to find God, imagining he will find Him by fighting alongside the Afghans against the communist regime of the Soviet Union, but all he finds is war and death, followed by another regime and more misfortunes. He will eventually understand that the only way to find God is to help the people dying from wounds and hunger. What is Kandahar? A city, a place on Earth, the setting of the film? No. In the film, it is only mentioned, never appearing on screen, it is merely a symbol of the pursuit of a goal. What goal, and who is it for? This is a question every viewer must answer for themselves.

Kandahar is an unusual film; it is hard to talk about acting because practically all roles are played by non-professional actors. Watching it, one gets the impression that the director hired people for his film whom he found in the desert during the shooting: the Red Cross mission plays the Red Cross mission, the doctors play doctors, and the cripples play cripples. The film was based on true events written by Canadian journalist Niloufar Pazira, who brought the idea to the Iranian director. He decided not only to film the story but also to cast the journalist in the lead role. These unusual events surrounding Kandahar did not end there. After its premiere in the United States, the media discovered that one of the main characters, played by Hassan Tantai, was identified by the FBI as a wanted murderer of the Iranian embassy spokesman in Washington during the Shah’s time. Could this be another paradox of history?