Heat and Dust

[hulegu]

I've been on an Afghan movie tip lately: Osama last night, and Kandahar the night before. On account of my relative poverty lately my theatre-going has been diminished of late, and so taking advantage of the excellent DVD library at SOAS has become a not unacceptable substitute

Comments

[lessesne]

I saw both of the films last year, and came away from both feeling like either the movies were lacking something or I was. I completely agree that they were stunningly shot, particularly the wedding-goers' scenes in Kandahar. Also, as you point out, where else might a typical westerner get an oppurtunity to experience the look and feel of Afghanistan? I was definitely grateful to both films for that. The gap or disappointment I felt in the movies may simply come from cultural differences in storytelling -- i had a similar feeling with a couple of Iranian movies i watched recently. Or, conversely, it may have more to do with the directors in question and where they got their training. My knowledge of film history and technique is woefully inadequate, but I would guess that the directors trained in European film schools or with European film makers???? At any rate, though these movies are only two stories of the millions that exist in Afghanistan, they at least gave me a few pictures to put with a country about which I know so little.

[hulegu]

Hohsen Makhmalbaf, director of Kandahar, is to contemporary Iranian cinema what Eisenstein was to Russian cinema, or Truffaut to French cinema - he is the be all and end all, and head of of his own moviemaking family dynasty. He didn't, as far as I'm aware, receive any training in Europe. Indeed, such is his cultural stature within Iran that he is often able to get away with making artistic statements that the Ayatollahs might not otherwise tolerate in a person of lesser renown.

Siddiq Barmak, meanwhile, director of Osama, trained in Moscow in the 1980s and worked as a documentary maker in his native Afghanistan prior to the establishment of the Taliban regime. Like Makhmalbuf, he seems to prefer a naturalistic, almost pseudo-documentary, style of film-making. I suppose in that sense they are more in line with recent, largely digital camera based, concepts of film-making e.g. Dogme etc. The lack of a definite conclusion is probably the sticking point for most audiences.