Niloufar Pazira: Once upon a time in Afghanistan

When Niloufar Pazira approached a film-maker with a harrowing story about a friend trapped by the Taliban, neither of them guessed how timely the result would be. By David Usborne

All things considered, you would expect Niloufar Pazira to be a little more pleased with herself. In the coming weeks, audiences in Britain and the United States will see her starring in a remarkable new film called Kandahar. It is, as you would guess, about Afghanistan. The timing could not be more brilliant.

First shown last May at the Cannes Film Festival, Kandahar was made by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the acclaimed Iranian film director. It bewitched many critics, even if both the director and star had to devote most of their energies then to explaining where Kandahar was exactly and why it was significant as the spiritual home of the rulers of Afghanistan known as the Taliban.

Today, we all know about the Taliban and their regime. This film, however, with its stunning cinematography and allegorical style, allows us to get a little closer still to the daily misery of plight of ordinary citizens in Afghanistan. Filmed on the Iranian-Afghan border, it melds fiction with documentary and tragedy with black comedy. The actors, except for the few leads, were real refugees in that area.

Kandahar follows a courageous journalist named Nafas, played by Pazira, as she tries to enter Afghanistan, beneath the Taliban radar, to rescue a desperate sister. The sister, who has lost both legs from a landmine, has sent a message saying that she intends to take her own life at the hour of the next solar eclipse. When Nafar finally crosses the border, her body covered head-to-toe in the burka that all women must wear by order of the Taliban, she has just three days to reach her in Kandahar.

Sustained by sheer grit and determination, Nefar falls upon a series of different guides who attempt to bring her closer to the city and to her sister. With each guide, she encounters new and strange obstacles and situations. A long scene at a Red Cross camp that fits victims of landmine explosions with false limbs probably gives us the film's most vivid and memorable images. None are more extraordinary than the sight of pairs of prosthetic legs falling from the sky to the desert below. With little parachutes attached, they have been been dropped by a relief aircraft. As the legs come down from the clouds, a pathetic gaggle of one-legged men on crutches rushes to the place where the brand new legs will finally land.

It is not a slick film, by any means. Makhmalbaf, whose daughter Samira directed two other films that have been featured in past years at Cannes, The Apple and Blackboards, does not have access to Hollywood-scale funding. The acting, on occasion, is so terrible – especially at the Red Cross camp – that it detracts from the film's beauty and the importance of its message. You wish occasionally that Makhmalbaf and Pazira had made a straightforward documentary about their subject – the suffering and sheer dejection that Taliban rule has brought to so many in Afghanistan, and especially to its women.

Pazira, whose family took her out of Kabul first to Pakistan and then to Canada when she was 16, is, in fact, a documentary film-maker by trade and not an actor at all. And she originally approached Makhmalbaf about making a documentary piece. That was in 1998, when she thought she had an interesting story. A childhood friend had written to her from Afghanistan saying that life under the Taliban had become so terrible and pointless that she was considering suicide. In that same year, Pazira tried to enter Afghanistan to rescue her but was thwarted and never made it into the country. She went to Makhmalbaf in Tehran, who had already made a film about Afghani refugees called The Cyclist, for help. It was last year when he finally said that he was interested in making a semi-fictional piece based on what she had told him. Thus Pazira became the journalist Nafas and her friend was turned into a long-lost sister.

The two and a half months spent shooting the film on location was, Pazira admits, very gruelling. She and Makhmalbaf had to bring doctors in from outside to deal with countless refugees who were both sick and seriously malnourished. Filming was sometimes abandoned as the crew found themselves rushing new arrivals at the border to nearby medical help. "It was just such an overwhelming experience of being there and dealing with all these problems that sometimes I could hardly remember what I was supposed to be doing," Pazira recalls. "Sometimes we just used to find people lying in the desert too weak to stand up or move."

There were also huge cultural problems to overcome. Most of the refugees invited to be extras had never seen a film before and therefore could not grasp what they were meant to be doing. "We had to set up a small theatre with a TV and a VCR and show them films just to introduce them to the concept," Pazira explains. Because the tribes were also very conservative, their leaders were often resistant to co-operating with the film crew, particularly when it came to getting women before the camera. "We tried very hard to convince them that this was something that would show their plight to the world, and slowly they became a little more interested in helping us."

Pazira was also clear about why she went through such hardship. Partly it was for the friend, who, after the Taliban took power, found herself essentially under house arrest. In Afghanistan today, girls cannot attend school after the age of eight and women are not allowed to work. (Pazira hasn't heard from her since.) "The last note I received from her said she regretted that she couldn't do everything she wanted to do in life and that she wanted me to live her life for her, to the full and on her behalf."

But it was also to get word out to the rest of the world how dire the human condition had become in her country. "In almost 100 years of world cinema, Afghanistan has essentially been left out," she says. She felt that Makhmalbaf was finally making a serious film about her native land for a worldwide audience.

Nobody could have know then, however, how the circumstances surrounding Afghanistan would change in the wake of the 11 September terror attacks in the United States. Suddenly, Kandahar has a currency that nobody could have anticipated. When it was screened recently on the campus of Columbia University in Manhattan – Niloufar Pazira herself attended and talked about the film afterwards – it was standing-room only and a second screening had to be arranged for the following evening. There is an evident thirst for understanding about what is happening in Afghanistan. Kandahar can at least help to quench it.

But Pazira is modest about what she and Makhmalbaf have achieved. She is too preoccupied with what is happening now, with the new suffering that is being visited upon her country. "I can't say that I am very proud that I have done this," she says. "I am proud, I suppose, if we can create some kid of understanding for people here about Afghanistan, if they come out seeing Afghanistan a little differently."

Getting a grasp of what it is like for real people in her native land is especially important now, she adds. Americans might then be less enthusiastic about the military response of Washington to what happened in September.

"Violence always produces more violence, it doesn't stop it. That is especially true in my country, where there is a pathological sense of warfare. Generations of Afghanis have grown up in war and don't know anything outside it".

She hopes that those of us who see the film will be more sensitive to what havoc the American and British bombs are wreaking. "How would people here feel if they had 10 million unexploded mines lying around their country and then they were being bombed from the sky when at the same time they are starving? How would they feel? As human beings? As individuals?"

'Kandahar' starts 16 Nov at the ICA, London (020-7930 3647)