Hidden behind a burka, Nafas, the sister from Canada, makes her way across the border with a family of refugees. When they are robbed by brigands and the family turns back, she decides to continue on her way, accompanied first by a young boy who was just expelled from a Qur'anic school, and then by an African American convert to Islam, who has become disillusioned with the turn the country has taken under the Taliban.
As the film proceeds, Nafas learns more and more about the hardships women face under the Taliban, and even more so, how years of war have destroyed Afghan society. Her African A0merican guide, hidden behind a false beard, points out to her that the only technological progress allowed in the country is weaponry. As they wander the countryside, Nafas records her impressions into a portable tape recorder hidden beneath her veils. She sees children robbing corpses to survive, people fighting over artificial limbs that they might need in case they walk through a minefield, and doctors who examine female patients from behind a curtain with a hole in it.
Nafas never reaches her sister. When her African American guide turns back, because he is afraid to enter the city of Kandahar, she follows a guide who had just scammed a pair of artificial legs out of the Red Cross. Dressed in burkas, the pair join a wedding party which is stopped by the Taliban because they are playing musical instruments and singing--forbidden by Afghan law. Her guide is taken away and she is unveiled. Captured, she seems destined to fall into the same kind of life that she hoped to help her sister escape.
An uncannily timely mix of fiction and documentary, Kandahar is Iranian director Mohsen (Gabbeh) Makhmalbaf's look at the plight of the Afghanistan people -- particularly women -- under Taliban rule. The events after Sept. 11 may have resulted in great political change in that country, but the suffering caused by famine, poverty, disease and crime remain. The world's newfound familiarity with the region's troubles only make Kandahar more compelling.
In the tradition of contemporary Iranian cinema, the story line is classically simple: Nafas (Nelofer Pazira), an Afghan-born journalist living in Canada, learns her sister, who lives in Kandahar, is planning to commit suicide during the next solar eclipse, which will take place in three days.
Desperate to reach her before it's too late, Nafas dons the requisite burka and succumbs to local tradition, essentially eradicating her own identity, while making the perilous journey to her sister's home. Her encounters along the way -- a boy kicked out of school for improperly reciting the Koran, a doctor who turns out to be an American living incognito in Afghanistan, Red Cross workers overrun by patients -- coalesce into a portrait of a country that is heartbreaking, even depressing, yet filled with an eerie beauty.
Making painterly use of vast desert landscapes, rich fabrics and striking imagery (such as a caravan of women, shrouded in colorful burkas, journeying across the sand dunes), Makhmalbaf turns Afghanistan into a surreal, alien world where misery and hope coexist side byside. The cast is mostly nonactors (including Pazira, who is herself an Afghan exile living in Canada with her family), which renders some of the line readings a bit flat.
But if the dramatics of the movie fail to engage as fully as they should, Kandahar remains fascinating as a piece of lyrical journalism -- filled with indelible moments, like a group of children being taught never to pick up dolls on the street (there is usually a land mine underneath), or a shot of hundreds of maimed men on crutches racing across the desert, eager to be the first to reach a shipment of prosthetic limbs that has been parachuted down by relief workers. It's those sights, not the movie's wobbly drama, that you remember the most, and Makhmalbaf ends the film on a devastating, haunting note that refuses to provide any pat solutions.
Throughout the film, we see images of a backward, tormented land: the shuffling parties of women herded across the desert, blankets over them as if they were characters in some avant-garde play; beautifully ornamented three-wheel carts puttering across the sands, leaving from nowhere and going nowhere.
The film is easier to follow than most Iranian imports. Good as they are--and they're generally quite good--they still tend to drop the Western viewer right into the center of a plot without much preparation. Since this is a road picture, we get more of a chance to catch our bearings. And though it's simpler than the common Iranian film, Kandahar is complex enough--it's not a standard story of heroism. Our heroine is a little anti-heroic--arrogant, standoffish. She's a persistent foreigner as an Easterner might see one: a tourist unable to adapt herself to the situation. She distances herself from her experiences by recording them (she's making a tape for her sister).
This tape reflects the director's gleanings, his ideas and his poetry. Makhmalbaf captures the misrule and perversity of the Taliban: next to which the perversity and misrule of even the Iranian government looks almost reasoned.
Furthermore, it was a window for us to view the world behind our world as it showcased unique culture and practices which we never imagined before.
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