One of the effects of the 911 attacks was to wake up the distracted Western public to the horror of Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Now, with the Taliban out of power, Osama, the first film produced in Afghanistan since they took over in 1996, arrives to nudge us back into a state of alertness, and also, as remnants of the ousted regime continue to menace that nation's peace and stability, to trouble our sleep and our consciences as well.
Written and directed by Siddiq Barmak, an Afghan filmmaker trained in Moscow in the 1980s and clearly influenced by the Iranian humanist cinema of the 1990s, Osama begins with an apt epigraph from Nelson Mandela: "I can forgive, but I cannot forget."
Barmak is unsparing in his anatomy of the Taliban's cruelty, especially as it was directed against women, but there is very little feeling of vengefulness or hatred in the film, which makes it all the more devastating in the end.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF CROWN FILMS
The opening scenes, a kind of trompe l'oeil documentary within the movie whose meaning becomes clear only much later, capture the violent suppression of a women's-rights demonstration in the sandy, war-blasted streets of Kabul. A scared young girl (Marina Golbahari) watches from a doorway as Taliban soldiers, using water hoses, live ammunition and grenade launchers, scatter a crowd of women in blue and ocher burkhas.
This is only the most brutal and public manifestation of the pervasive terror under which women in Kabul must live. The hospital where the girl's mother works is raided, and the mother (Zubaida Sahar) is saved from arrest only when a man whose father is in her care says he is her husband. There is an almost absurd sadism to the Taliban's regulations of women's behavior. Even when a household includes no men -- hardly uncommon after so many years of war -- the women still may not be seen in public or earn a living. An uncovered foot or an unwelcome word can lead to harassment, or even severe
punishment.
Despite all this injustice, the girl's kindly grandmother insists that the sufferings of men and women are equal because the sexes themselves are equal. This leads her to conclude that they may also be interchangeable, and so her granddaughter, with a short haircut and a dark skullcap, is sent out to work for a sympathetic shopkeeper. (She is later given the name Osama by a young beggar who knows the secret of her identity.) A similar masquerade was at the heart of Majid Majidi's film Baran, about an Afghan refugee in Tehran who disguised herself as a boy to work at a construction site.
Like Majidi, Barmak has a gently poetic visual sense: after her metamorphosis, one of the girl's severed braids is planted in a flower pot and watered by an intravenous drip her mother rescued from the shut-down hospital. He is also able to find moments of tenderness and humor in his bleak story. One sequence that stands out is a lesson in intimate hygiene taught to madrasa students by an elderly mullah -- a glimpse at the radical Islamist approach to sex education.
Barmak's patron was the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, whose Kandahar is set in Taliban-era Afghanistan and whose daughter Samira's At Five O'Clock in the Afternoon takes place in Kabul after the American-led rout of the Taliban. Some of the surrealist touches in Osama -- gorgeous, haunting images that call for an adjective like Makhmalbafian -- may be a result of this association, and the orange glow that suffuses the landscape in all three movies may owe something to the fact that they share the gifted cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafuri. This is not to take anything away from Barmak, who had the self-confidence to embark on this project with donated equipment, a tiny budget and a cast of nonprofessionals recruited from the streets of Kabul.
The mere existence of the movie, which received the Camera d'Or special mention for best first feature in Cannes last year and the Golden Globe for best foreign film last month, would be impressive enough. But the movie's power and coherence are such that you forget completely about the hard circumstances of its making, which is nothing short of astonishing.
There is not much overt or explicit violence in Osama, which opens today in Taiwan, but an unshakable dread shadows the bright alleyways of Kabul and seeps through the heavy wooden doors of the houses. Like The Pianist, Roman Polanski's tour of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Osama is a meticulous and beautifully made inquiry into the ways that ideological evil can infect, and ultimately destroy, the intimacies and small pleasures of daily life.
Osama has no special resiliency or survival skills; her face is, at every moment, a study in suppressed panic and worried passivity. Her unvarnished vulnerability, along with the director's combination of tough-mindedness and lyricism, prevents the movie from becoming at all sentimental; instead, it is beautiful, thoughtful and almost unbearably sad.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
This year’s Michelin Gourmand Bib sported 16 new entries in the 126-strong Taiwan directory. The fight for the best braised pork rice and the crispiest scallion pancake painstakingly continued, but what stood out in the lineup this year? Pang Taqueria (胖塔可利亞); Taiwan’s first Michelin-recommended Mexican restaurant. Chef Charles Chen (陳治宇) is a self-confessed Americophile, earning his chef whites at a fine-dining Latin-American fusion restaurant. But what makes this Xinyi (信義) spot stand head and shoulders above Taipei’s existing Mexican offerings? The authenticity. The produce. The care. AUTHENTIC EATS In my time on the island, I have caved too many times to
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not