Kandahar
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Movie Reviews of Kandahar
Movie Review: An Alright Drama
Summary: 4 Stars
It was interesting and beautiful. The acting looked like acting...this is not the documentary it looks like. If some of the performances had not occasionally distracted me into rembering I was watching a movie, I'd have given it 5 stars.Movie Review: Kandahar
Summary: 3 Stars
Set in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Kandahar follows the quest of Nafas (Niloufar Pazira) to illegally reenter the country three days before her sister -- whose legs were blown off by a landmine years earlier -- can carry out an intended suicide during the last eclipse of the 20th century. During her arduous trek through the war-torn wastes, Nafas encounters four distinct guides, each representing a different atrocity plaguing modern day Afghanistan: a defeated Afghan refugee; a fatherless young boy expelled from an Islamic religious school; an African-American militant turned healer; and a one-handed thief who claims to be the victim of a landmine accident. These encounters turn out to be the most structurally sound elements of an otherwise disjointed and unsatisfying narrative. The story is based on journalist Pazira's own unsuccessful attempt to reach a friend in Afghanistan after the Taliban took power. But the film is considerably less successful as a fictional odyssey through a harsh and hostile environment than it is as an exploration of modern war-ravaged Afghanistan. Substituting Iranian for Afghanistan desertscapes, director of photography Ebrahim Ghafouri captures stunning and indelible images, the most impressive coming when a group of legless men race on crutches to retrieve parachuting artificial legs dropped from a Red Cross helicopter. But director Makhmalbaf's lack of closure regarding the plot is frustrating -- we never learn whether Nafas ever reaches Kandahar and saves her sister. If the entire point is -- contrived from information gleaned via the closing frame -- that all of Afghanistan has been under an eclipse since the Taliban arrived, fine. But it needs clearer delineation to have the necessary punch so that audiences don't have to be left guessing as to what the ultimate point of the movie is, other than one of oppressed futility. The film runs a scant 85 minutes, so this was obviously an intentional decision, perhaps meant to reflect the ambiguity of international press regarding the conditions within Afghanistan (pre-September 11th). Yet Kandahar isn't a documentary, it's a feature film by one of Iran's foremost directors, and as such one would have hoped that the staging and acting were up to Makhmalbaf's usual standards. Sadly, the murky conclusion hampers an otherwise fascinating and utterly disquieting look at a place alien to many Westerners who up until recently couldn't have cared less about its people or politics.Movie Review: Ignorant savages
Summary: 3 Stars
As I was watching the film I had the impression that it was a documentary, and that a hidden camera was being used to capture real people. There were times when I wondered where the hidden camera was, and who was holding it.
The story is about a woman born in Afghanistan who escaped to Canada and became a journalist. She is returning to Afghanistan to try to rescue her sister, who told her that she plans to kill herself soon.
As I watched the film, as I watched the oppressed women with their faces completely covered in their burkas, as I watched the little children learning the dogma of their religion, which is all about killing infidels, I had no sympathy for the Afghan culture. Afghans, and Middle Eastern Muslims in general, come off as brainwashed and ignorant savages.
One major character in the film is an American black man who impersonates a Muslim doctor and dispenses medical advice and food to the people. He wears a false beard. As he was counseling the Canadian journalist for her stomach problems, I was struck by the situation of two pretenders in a foreign land. Since the film is not a documentary, but a scripted story, I find the characters to be unbelievable as presented.
The main impression I take away from this film is that the Arab people are dangerous, lying, ignorant savages. Is that what the director and writer had in mind? Is that the impression they were trying to convey?
I'm not totally clear on how this film ends. Is the journalist now a captive in Afghanistan? Can she get out? Is she a captive in the sense that she can't get back to Canada and must live a life of oppression in her native land? Is she going to be imprisoned literally? We don't really have closure and clarity here.
Religion is a dangerous thing, isn't it. They get you when you're young, they fill your baby brain with lies and garbage, and it stays with you into adulthood. Religion controls you like a puppetmaster. It's a damn shame that anyone believes this nonsense in the first place. I wish the search for God and truth were carried on by more godly and more honest people.
The main products of religion today are bigotry, war, burkas, and barring of medical research in America. What a pile of trash. What a bunch of yahoos the human race is. God is slandered everywhere you turn.
Movie Review: Burkha
Summary: 3 Stars
An Iranian film produced before the American invasion of Afghanistan, KANDAHAR isn't so much a feature film with a contiguous story as a series of 1-act plays that portray the harshness of life for women, and life in general, under Taliban rule. Nafas (Nelofer Pazira) is a young woman of Afghani birth who emigrated as a child with her family to Canada. Her sister, who had lost both legs to a land mine, was left behind. Nafas has learned that her sister is planning to commit suicide coincident with the final solar eclipse of the twentieth century. As the film begins, Nafas is being ferried by helicopter to an Afghani refugee camp in Iran. From there, she hopes to smuggle herself across the border to KANDAHAR, where her sister lives, and persuade her to go on living.
Both the beginning and end of the film are minimalist. Instead, the viewer is witness to a series of vignettes, some almost surreal, that reflect the dismal state of the country. Of course, during her journey, Nafas wears a burkha, that head to foot drape that women must wear in public and which relegates them to the status of non-entities.
Two sequences are particularly evocative of the film's message. When Nafas becomes ill and seeks help, the male caregiver is limited by law to examining his patient's mouth and eyes through a small hole cut in a sheet barrier while asking questions via a child intermediary. And later, as a Red Cross helicopter drops prosthetic legs by parachute into a desert aid station set up to help civilians maimed by landmines, we watch a dozen or so amputees desperately scrambling on their crutches to reach the drop zone. Indeed, the prosthetics are so much in demand that a scam artist, seeking to acquire them as a goods for future enrichment, is shown bedeviling foreign medical workers.
Pazira's Nafas is attractive, and the dehumanizing effect of the burkha is striking on those occasions when she must unveil.
KANDAHAR is presented in a pseudo-documentary style. Unfortunately, while the individual sequences are hard-hitting and revealing, the lack of a unifying story, and especially the absence of substantive ending, doesn't make for a completely satisfying film. The viewers' sympathies may perhaps remain detached.
Movie Review: Worth seeing, but although it is perhaps more compelling than a straight-up documentary, it's not that great a story
Summary: 3 Stars
Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film KANDAHAR was shot a couple of years before the US invasion of Afghanistan and documents the appalling state of the country in the aftermath of the Russian invasion, subsequent civil war and the rise of Taliban. The film opens on the Iran-Afghan border, where we meet Nafas (Nelofer Pazira), an Afghan refugee in Canada. Nafas is drawn back to her homeland after receiving a letter from her sister, who didn't make it out of this failed state and plans to kill herself at the last solar eclipse of the 20th century. Nafas has only two days to reach her sister and convince her that life is worth living, but the poverty and desperation of Afghanistan raises up several obstacles.
The strong point of KANDAHAR, what makes this film worth seeing, is the emotional force of its depiction of Afghanistan. There are outdoor shots here that will haunt you for long afterward: a group of amputees racing each other on their crutches to seize a pair of artificial legs that the Red Cross parachuted in; a wedding procession consisting of women who sing joyfully as they walk over desert sands, visible only as burkas of every colour. This is certainly a hell on Earth that needed international intervention on a scale larger than idealistic but powerless charity workers, so I don't rue the US invasion, though I am angry that the occupation has been handled with so little regard so the people we were supposedly there to liberate.
In spite of the memorable nature of KANDAHAR, however, it's not very good according to some qualities one normally judges a film by. The acting by the main roles is godawful, with Nafas, the American doctor and the Australian nurse delivering their lines as if they recall them only with effort, or are reading them off cue cards. The plot, that is, the personal drama of the protagonist as opposed to the saga of Afghanistan's pain, is also weak. Storytelling seems to take a back seat to a didactic purpose. So I'm put in the awkward position of recommending this film to everyone as a must-see, but unable to award it more than three stars.