In A Strange Land

Moshen Makhmalbaf's film Kandahar (2001) tells the story of Nafas (Niloufar Pazira), a young journalist who returns to her birthplace in Afghanistan to save her suicidal sister whose legs were amputated after being damaged by an exploded land-mine. In order to get to Kandahar safely Nafas must travel over a land-mine infested desert wearing the Burqa as disguise. The film not only exposes the Taliban’s oppression of women through the enforced wearing of Islamic dress, the taboo on women working away from home or from listening to music, but the plight of many amputees who need prosthetic legs. Afganistan is one of the three worst land-mined countries in the world and has about 10 million active mines. The film highlights the difference ascribed to women’s bodies, which are silenced and homogenised under the Burqa as well as the bodily difference of the amputees. Both are disfigured by the consequences of living under the Taliban's oppressive reign and the technologies of war. Another Iranian film-maker, Siddiq Barmak also stressed the lack of freedom for Afghani women under Taliban rule in his film Osama (2004). As the grandmother removes her grand-daughter's long hair, she says: ‘girls can be boys if they cut their hair and boys can be girls under the Burqa’.

Two years after Moshen's film, his daughter Samira Makhmalbaf made At Five in the Afternoon (2003; the first film to be shot in Kabul after the NATO invasion. In the first scenes two women walk towards us, at the end they walk away. The return, from closing to opening scenes suggests that for these Afghani women there can be no escape from their cycle of life. The scene made more potent by the haunting soundtrack of whispered words from a poem by Federico García Lorca. It is a short refrain that uses repetition to load time with significance.

At five in the afternoon.
Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon!
It was five by all the clocks!
It was five in the shade of the afternoon!

Set in the ruined city of Kabul (Afghanistan) after the defeat of the Taliban, the film shows a transitional stage between the oppressive fundamentalist regime inflicted on women, to a culture in which women are permitted to show their face, listen to music, attend school and be seen in public without a male family member. However the film reveals that Qur’anic law and the harsh realities of everyday life still overshadows the lives of Afghani women.

This was made painfully obvious in the documentary In a Strange Land screened last night on ABC1. It gave further insight into the fear, pain and anguish suffered by Afghani women under oppressive male dominance. It traced twenty-one year old Nel Hedayat's journey back to her homeland Afghanistan. She was just six years old when her parents came to Britain to make a new home for her away from war ravaged Kabul, where much of her family still live. She is shocked by much of what she sees and although many women she meets are struggling for freedoms, such as the right to attend school and be independent, she discovers that the majority wear the Burqa and are subject to the law of their father or husband who insist that they cover themselves in public and don't venture alone into public places. Transgressions against their father or husband will land them in jail. Nel discovers the fact that girls as young as thirteen are forced into arranged marriages with men much older than them (sometimes 60 years old) and suffer violence, terror and sexual abuse in these love-less marriages. Many attempt suicide by self-immolation ~ dousing themselves in petrol and setting themselves on fire. Nel visited the burn unit of a local hospital where young female survivors of attempted suicide, lie in pain contemplating their uncertain future. Nel cried outside the ward, she didn't want to appear vulnerable in front of these stoic females who were strong, perhaps hardened by their life experiences. There are many ways that these victims could have attempted to end their lives, however self-immolation was chosen as an extremely visual political act, a protest against the harsh injustices they endure.

See my article:

'Samira Makhmalbaf's Darkness and Light: At Five in the Afternoon', Metro Magazine, Melbourne, Australia, #161, June 2009