Kandahar = Safar e Ghandehar

An Afghani refugee living in Canada, Nafas (played by Nelofer Pazira), receives a letter from her sister in Kandahar informing her that due to the patriarchal fundamentalism of the Taliban, the sister will suicide before the next eclipse. Nafas flies to the Afghani-Iran border and then begins a difficult and dangerous journey across the war-ravaged country to the city of Kandahar. On arriving at the border she has to put on the burkha, which symbolises the oppression of women she has sought to escape but which also allows her to disappear and to evade the gaze of the Taliban as she undertakes her search. Makhmalbaf’s film, made before the terrorist bombing on the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001, is a deeply moving indictment of war. He achieves this by creating distinct poetic episodes around the central story: a young boy whose family and village has been destroyed in the war tries to combat his illiteracy and stay on at the Qu’ranic school which is his only hope of survival; refugee workers on the Afghani-Iran border attempt to teach children how to avoid land mines; an African-American exile wanted for terrorism in the USA attempts to be a doctor to a devastated village; and Red Crescent workers in the inhospitable centre of Afghanistan attempt to make surreal decisions on which lives are worth saving. Nafas’s search is itself loosely based on Pazira’s own experiences and the greatest sequences in “Kandahar” achieve their hallucinatory power by combining poetry and documentary realism. As we see what seems to be an army of land mine victims rush, crawl and hop across the desert to grab at prosthetic limbs that UN helicopters drop from the skies, we are aware that we are witnessing horrors and savagery that remain, in words, indescribable. Often “Kandahar” shows the limitations of being filmed in hazardous, difficult circumstances: the acting is not always consistent, some scenes are truncated and ragged. But Nafas’s story and her journey is never less than absorbing. And the film itself is never just a catalogue of horrors. Makhmalbaf’s intentions are proudly humanist and political and we are never in doubt of his intellect and integrity. This is a great anti-war film. Winner of the Ecumenical Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival, 2001.