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When Mohsen Makhmalbaf's latest film Kandahar opened at the Cannes film festival last spring, few Americans could've told you that the title referred to any city, much less one in Afghanistan. Nine months later, pretty much all of us could look at a globe and pick it out. In those intervening months, the Taliban, whose base of support was in Kandahar, have been largely destroyed as a political force, but Makhmalbaf's movie is still powerfully resonant.

The film, which is structured as a documentary (an effect enhanced by the heavy use of hand-held cameras), was inspired by the true story of a woman's attempt to reach Kandahar and save a close friend. In the film, Nafas, a female journalist who was born in Afghanistan but fled to Canada, receives a letter from her sister who is threatening to commit suicide "at the time of the last eclipse of the twentieth century." Nafas decides to return to her birthplace in the hope of rescuing her sister.

Kandahar begins with Nafas hitching a ride on a Red Cross helicopter to an Iranian border town. From there, she hooks up with a family returning to Kandahar, since it's extremely dangerous for a woman to be traveling alone. But a bandit attacks the family and, penniless, they decide to return to Iran. Nafas, however, is short of time and presses on. She hires a young boy as a guide, and along the way she meets an African-American named Tabib Sahid who has come to Afghanistan to "search for God." Instead, he's found miserable poverty, oppression of women, and unending war. Finding a kindred spirit in Nafas (his look of surprised joy when she speaks English is fantastic), he decides to help her.

The rest of the film is a recounting of her journey, some of which is darkly comic and some just horrifically dark. A scene at a Red Cross station in the middle of nowhere, where two French aid workers are passing
out artificial legs, is a more compelling argument for banning land mines than a hundred U.N. resolutions. Later Nafas joins a wedding procession of dozens of women all dressed in colorful burqas (the head-to-toe covering mandated under the Taliban), and the effect is other-worldly.

One of the things I love about foreign films is that they offer perspectives on the world that you just can't find in American television, magazines, or other media. Our commentators and authors spend so much time giving their own limited viewpoint and so little time trying to understand anyone else's. So it was genuinely provocative to see the Afghani landscape and people through Makhmalbaf's lens. With all of the news I've seen in the last several months, the movie Kandahar was the first time I felt like I was actually *inside* Afghanistan.

Not that Makhmalbaf is an objective observer. His humanist vision, seen in earlier films like The Silence and Gabbeh, is prominent and his decision to side with Nafas is obvious. But there's also a compassion for the people of Afghanistan, from the mullah running a militant Islamic school for boys to the con man trying to get an artificial leg he can sell. And Makhmalbaf's trademark use of color and landscape is very much in evidence. The use of sweeping sand dunes is particularly evocative.

Kandahar isn't without its faults. The movie uses non-professional actors, and it shows. Some are great (Hassan Tantai as Tabib is especially good), but others are uncomfortable to watch. Furthermore, the movie's conclusion feels rushed, as if Makhmalbaf had run out of either money or time. Nonetheless, Kandahar is a helpful antidote to the monolithic coverage we receive about this newly-"relevant" country. 

J. Robert Parks 2/20/2002