There's nothing frivolous about beauty school when hearing about the individual lives of these women in Afghanistan, and the contrast between them and the idealistic beauticians from America.
There's nothing frivolous about beauty school when hearing about the individual lives of these women in Afghanistan, and the contrast between them and the idealistic beauticians from America.
A team of women attempts to bring a vital part of the American way of life to war-torn Afghanistan in this documentary. Sponsored by U.S.-based manufacturers of hair-care products and cosmetics, a group of American volunteers traveled to Afghanistan to start the nation's first Western-styled school of cosmetology after the collapse of the Taliban. Eager to offer Afghan women a different way of looking at themselves and others, the friendly but often gregarious Americans occasionally find
themselves at odds with their Afghan students, who still possess deeply ingrained notions of modesty and gender inequality as they learn to style hair and apply makeup as they do in the West. The Beauty Academy of Kabul was shown in competition at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
Most of the students had suffered or witnessed horrific abuses and crimes under the Taliban, yet the film shows two fatuous U.S. instructors who clearly missed the sensitivity training.
Without editorializing, Mermin raises fascinating questions about the cultural impact of globalization, the allure of the West, and the troubled history of an ancient land.
A few of the academy's students receive personal profiles, and their resilience after years of war and oppression is remarkable. If ever that "triumph of the human spirit" cliché could be applied to a group of people, this is it.
It's a demonstration of the ancient proverb: Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today, but teach a man to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime.
The interaction between the self-absorbed, oblivious hairdressers and their quiet, stubborn, traditional students runs from the hilarious to the heartbreaking.
A group of American beauticians, moved by stories of the Taliban, travels to Kabul to open a hairdressers' school for Afghan women. There are 63 different things wrong with that premise, can you name all of them? Somehow, I really don't know how, this documentary transcends its problematic subject. An affirmation of
the secular humanist project and a spritz of mineral water in the face of death-worshipping asceticism.
Well...there are two things about this documentary, and i have to accept that it is pretty hard to give a rating, but i put it in relation with the "feminist" angloamerican point of view, that finally is the one of the idea of such project. I pefectly share my opinion with that critic that said "Captures the essence of
Americans' sense of empowerment and innate goodness -- and our cultural myopia-". This movie really put me mad!!!! I just could rescue the Afgani teachers and one blond curly medium hair, but the rest of them i just think are pathetic!!!!. It was amazing look about how much advertisement has this movie!!!!! In other hand the only that rescue this documentary is the testimony of the afgani women, i think that some of them are fantastic!!!. Finally this movie open so much points for discussion; the cultural imposition; the cultural intolerance; the lack of perception of cultural context and idiosyncrasy!!!!! I am agree that certain stuff is kind of unfair, but by the other way, why we must to think that all our occidental point of view is the only correct?...i guess people must encourage the change but without imposition respecting certain traditions and concepts...
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