When the Iranian film, Kandahar, was shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May, it unfairly received mixed notices from the media and went unrewarded by the festival jury. Such was the lack of interest in the Afghan city from which the film took its title that Kandahar had been blandly renamed The Sun Behind the Moon when it screened at the Toronto Film Festival a few days before the traumatic events of September 11th across the border in the US.
Now that the city of Kandahar is the forefront of the news every day, the film of the same name is finally finding the recognition it justly deserves as cinema audiences around the world seek more information on Afghanistan and life under the Taliban. President Bush recently asked to see it, and it has been breaking box-office records in Italy and Canada, the first western countries in which it has been released.
This chilling new film from the leading Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, delivers an unflinching depiction of life in Afghanistan since the totalitarian Taliban regime came to power in Kabul five years ago. Its specific emphasis is on the regime's absolute degradation of women, with girls forbidden to attend school and, in adulthood, denied a public life, only venturing outdoors covered from head to toe in burkas. "The burka is not an ornament," declares one man who has three wives. "It's a question of honour."
What distinguishes and drives Kandahar is Makhmalbaf's powerfully direct and unashamedly emotional response, as expressed through his fictional narrator, Nafas (played by Niloufar Pazira), an Afghan woman who has fled to Canada and sets about the arduous task of crossing the Iran-Afghanistan border when her despairing younger sister writes her a letter, threatening to commit suicide before the last solar eclipse of the 20th century.
In equal parts fascinating and horrifying, this potently cinematic drama precisely captures its milieu through eloquent visual imagery that includes heart-rending shots of marginalised people crippled by landmines and hopping on crutches through the desert when plastic limbs are dropped from a Red Cross helicopter.
Kandahar is the first internationally released fiction film to engage with life in Afghanistan since its director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, directed the 1988 film, The Cyclist, dealing with an Afghan exile living on the Iranian border. At Cannes, Makhmalbaf noted how Aghanistan belonged to Iran 250 years ago and that six million Afghans had fled their country for Iran since the war with the Soviet Union and the subsequent coming to power of the Taliban in September 1996.
"One day a young Afghan woman, who had taken refuge in Canada, came to see me," he said. "She had just received a letter from a friend who wanted to commit suicide because of the harsh conditions in Kandahar. She wanted to go back and help her friend at all cost. She asked me to go with her and film her journey."
He didn't go with her, but his interest was sufficiently aroused to make an undercover visit to Afghanistan to see the conditions of its people for himself.
"That's when I started doing research," he says. "I dissected thousands of pages of official documents about the economic, political and military situation, and I read literary works and watched documentaries. But this Afghan woman's journey to Kandahar still remained the basis for the screenplay."
In the film, that woman is named Nafas, which means "to breathe" in Afghan, because the burka, which women are forced to wear in public, "prevents women from breathing and from being free", he says. "The average Afghan woman is merely a harem member to men. When you look at these women wrapped in their burkas, there is an aesthetic harmony on the outside, but on the inside, under every burka, there is suffocation.
"It's a strange contradiction. As they do not have the right to show their physical beauty, they use the beauty of their clothing."
Coming from an Iranian, this film may appear hypocritical, given that Iran itself is in no danger of ever being mistaken as a hotbed for feminism. However, in his defence, it has to be stated that Makhmalbaf has worked on two arresting films dealing with the oppression of women in patriarchal Iranian society - he co-wrote The Apple, directed by his daughter, Samira, a Cannes prizewinner last year at the age of 20, and the screenplay for The Day I Became a Woman, directed by his wife, Marziyeh Meshkini.
In addition, this year saw the release of Jafar Panahi's powerful Iranian drama, The Circle, a pointedly political drama set in present-day Tehran.
It charts the fate of women on temporary release from prison - for unexplained transgressions - as they realise that the outside world is another form of prison in which a woman cannot smoke in public, travel out of town unaccompanied, or even be in a car with a man to whom she is not related.
Makhmalbaf believes that the Afghans have become stuck in their "ancient-ness", as he puts it.
"Like Reza Shah in Iran in the 1930s," he says, "or Ataturk in Turkey, Amanoullah has tried to make the country progress, but he soon came up against a huge religious resistance. One could say the country has been vaccinated against modern civilisation." Makhmalbaf says he has conducted an in-depth study on the subject, which he intends to publish under the title, Afghanistan: A Country Without Images.
"At the beginning of the 21st century, the Taliban have a problem with images," he says. "There is no cinema. They have even taken away television. Their newspapers do not print pictures. Taking photographs or painting is considered 'impure'.
"Music is forbidden. Girls' schools have been closed down. Girls do not have a right to anything, not even public baths.
"In 1996, the Taliban ordered a big library in Kabul, containing 55,000 books, to be burnt to the ground. According to a report by the United Nations, one million Afghans are in danger of being killed, without mentioning the millions of people who have lost their legs due to the mines. The world is more distressed at the destruction of stone Buddhas than at the fate of human beings."
So much has changed in just a few months.
Kandahar opens at the IFC in Dublin on December 21st