KANDAHAR
SAFAR E GANDEHAR



Iran-France, 2001, 85 min, color

Nafas is a young journalist who was born in Afghanistan and took refuge in Canada during the time of the civil war with the Taliban. As the film begins, she is telling her story to a helicopter pilot as he tries to smuggle her into Afghanistan. When her family fled Afghanistan, Nafas's younger sister was maimed by a land mine and lost in the fray. Now, years later, Nafas has received a letter from her sister; unable to go on living under the Taliban, she plans to commit suicide during the next eclipse. Nafas has three days to find a way into the country and then to the city of Kandahar, in order to stop her. Covering herself in the heavy burka, or veil, to enter Afghanistan, Nafas feels first-hand the suffocating lack of freedom experienced by contemporary Afghan women.

"Kandahar is the first time that Makhmalbaf has worked with a largely English-language script. He singles out the extreme version of Sunni Islam practiced by the Taliban, but his message could readily be applied to Iranian theocratic Shi'ism, or indeed market-driven capitalism. The result is a work of cinema as humanitarian as it is visionary."