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Daily News
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Afghanistan Remembered By Iranian Filmmaker
Twenty-three year old Samira Makhmalbaf returns to Cannes with her latest film focusing on the plight of women in a war torn country.
Monday, May 19, 2003
By A. G. Basoli
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While the Iraq-obsessed world media has already turn a blind eye to last year’s forsaken battlegrounds, at least in Cannes, Afghanistan remains in the headlines with Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon. Overcrowded press screenings were a telltale sign of weary, or perhaps guilt-stricken, media reps making up for the scant reception accorded to Samira Makhmalbaf pére’s foreboding Kandahar in May 2001, when reactions to the movie were summed up by the question “Why a movie about such an insignificant subject as Afghanistan?” Luckily undaunted, the Makhmalbaf Film House revisits a favorite subject and delivers a wrenching muted drama about generational clashes in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Taliban demise. “The difference between Kandahar and this film,” Makhmalbaf says, “is that before September 11, Kandahar was a film about a forgotten country. This film tries to correct the information we have received since.”
Inspired by Makhmalbaf senior’s Afghan refugee drama The Cyclist, At Five in the Afternoon was shot in Afghanistan in the Fall 2002 and features a cast of mostly non-professionals hand-picked by the 23-year-old Malhmalbaf on the streets of Kabul. It portrays a country only on the surface released from the grip of an oppressive regime where hostilities, far from being concluded, are in fact flaring up along cultural and gender divides, fueled by the deeply entrenched mentality that initially gave rise to the Taliban. “The cliché is that America came and rescued Afghanistan from the Taliban,” said Ms. Makhmalbaf at a well-attended and – inevitably – politically-charged press conference after the screening. “But when I went there I saw that it was different. I wanted to talk about the mystery of Afghanistan: the hidden war between past and present generations and the heavy shadow that men still cast over women.”
Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon focuses on Noqreh (Agheleh Rezaie), who attends a newly opened girls school in Kabul unbeknownst to her bigoted father who everyday drops her off at a girls’ religious school. Her dream is to become president and her ruby slippers in a world where women are expected to “stay at home and have children” are a pair of white pumps she dons under her burqa when she scuttles out of the girls’ madrassa to go to school. Noqreh clicks her heels in the street – a sin under the Taliban – and in the cavernous ruins of Darulaman, the Royal palace where she found shelter with her family and where she walks up and down the dilapidated halls fancying herself a premier in review of her troop.
In her quest to discover how one becomes president, she befriends a young poet who brings her a speech by Mr. Karzai and teases her about wanting a post in her government. For lack of better sources, she asks a French ISAF soldier who’s guarding the palace what made him vote for his president. “She’s a girl from the third world who starts to know what democracy is. She’s learning about vote and elections,” Makhmalbaf says. But when a school mate is killed by fundamentalists opposed to girl education, her outlook changes. “When she changed her shoes, she adopted the dress of power,” says Makhmalbaf. “When her friend is killed, she throws away the shoes.”
Haunting Noqreh’s slow downward spiral, Garcia Lorca’s mournful “Lament for Ignacio Mejías,” a gift from her poet-friend whose opening sequence gives the film its title, resonates through the final sequences of the film like the toll of a bell for the dead. “Some people think it’s naïve for a woman to want to be president, but I don’t share this view,” Makhmalbaf says. “In my view she succeeds, because being president is not just a question of power but of saving people and assuming responsibility.”
Hardships during the two-month shoot, which included many crowd scenes on the streets of Kabul, were especially severe in the pre-production stage when Makhmalbaf was looking for a female lead among Afghan women, most of whom were still afraid the Taliban might return and thought she was making a Bollywood film with music and dance. “I looked at all the old men of Kabul and most of the women,” she says. It was also difficult to find enough food to feed the crew and the actors since Afghanistan has such limited resources that its own people die of starvation. They finished shooting at noon, Makhmalbaf recalls and spent most of the afternoon feeding and paying the actors. “I went with open eyes and ears,” she says. “The reality of Afghanistan was the best thing I could show.”
Makhmalbaf’s overarching themes comment not only on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan but on the situation of democracy in the entire world. Makhmalbaf herself would be hard pressed to accept the post of president of Iran. “I wouldn’t know where to start,” she says. Asked to comment on President Bush’s representation of Iran as a part of the Axis of Evil she said: “Any fanatic government is Talib. I think Bush is a Talib in the democratic situation of America.”
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