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Eerily timely, Kandahar offers haunting images of a bleak land. Read critic reviews
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Movie Info
Nafas is a young Afghan journalist who has taken refuge in Canada. She receives a desperate letter from her little sister, who has stayed behind in Afghanistan and has decided to end her life before the imminently approaching eclipse of the sun. Nafas fled her country during the Taliban civil war. She decides to go and help her sister in Kandahar and attempts to cross the Iran-Afghanistan border...
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Genre: Drama
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Original Language: Persian
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Director: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
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Writer: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
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Release Date (Theaters): wide
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Release Date (DVD):
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Box Office (Gross USA): $1.4M
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Runtime:
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Production Co: Bac Films, Makhmalbaf Film House
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Sound Mix: Mono
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Aspect Ratio: Flat (1.85:1)
Cast & Crew
Critic Reviews for Kandahar
Audience Reviews for Kandahar
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It is true that Makhmalbaf tends to repeat himself sometimes (like with a redundant voice-over), but he casts a powerful look at a country living under the rule of Taliban and dominated by poverty and religious fundamentalism - which forced women into complete subjugation.
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Nafas is a young Afghan journalist that escaped from her country to Canada with her family after the Taliban conflict. Nevertheless, her sister was left behind and, unfortunately, lost her legs to a land mine. One day, Nafas receives a letter from her sister telling her that she has decided to commit suicide during the final eclipse of the 21st Century. Decided to get to her sister in time, Nafas begins a perilous journey through the desert all the way to Kandahar. Makhmalbaf utilizes the Afghan/Iranian border to illustrate the numerous conflicts of the frontier without being exploitative. The film presents a series of conflicts in an episodic manner throughout that carry a violent context before the eyes of Nafas: a world ruled by the "dog-eat-dog, bird-eat-bird, human-eat-human" law. Before Nafas physically enters the next scenario in her journey, we are provided with a brief introduction of the conflict present therein. By the time she arrives, the movie centers once again on the main plot, Nafas' journey, while using the correspondent conflict as a complimentary context. Sometimes, after she leaves, the conflict is given either a resolution, or is left unexplained given its difficulty. What are these scenarios? Women with no name or identity (and therefore referred to as "black heads" because of the black veils they use to cover their entire heads), religious extremisms, violence as a supposed means of "God" to settle conflicts, kids being mentally manipulated to fundamentalisms, poverty, victims of landmines, and a huge desert engulfing it all. Nafas comments to all of these tragic sights. By the time the film keeps progressing, the main plot begins to lose relevance and the movie's argument is transformed into an analysis of the conflicts in the frontier, with all of the people involved. We begin to realize that the lives and suffering of these people is as relevant as that of the seemingly unreachable sister. The learnings of Nafas begin to be our learnings. <i>Kandahar</i> is Makhmalbaf's proof of his directorial versatility and humanist vision, a director that portrayed violence without graphic content, that showed the power tragedies with only aftermaths, that made us think without dramatic manipulation... 79/100
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KANDAHAR was a semi-documentary movie that told the journey of an Afghani female journalist resident in Canada, Nafas, to reach the city of Kandahar, where she hoped to rescue her sister from committing suicide during an eclipse.The plot was very thin and the acting was frequently distracting, so it made it not a great drama. What was great, was the cinematography, filmed in the deserts of Afghanistan.. I liked the quote in the movie, when the doctor character said:"For women, hope is the day that they will be seen.The movie was a real and brutal portrayal of how women and children were treated in these countries. Disgusting.
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An interesting movie that centralizes on a woman's journey to save her sister in a country she has not been to since childhood. Niloufar Pazira stars. Worthy!
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