Word: barmak
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...preferential packaging." The most desirable students--the ones who blew the lid off the SAT, for instance, or those who will be the first in their family to go to college--get a nice surprise in their aid awards: fewer loans, more grants. "Just like an airplane," explains Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO). "No two people going from point A to point B paid the same price for the ticket...
...Barmak seeks to show the human side of tragedy. In Osama, about a young girl in Taliban-era Kabul who poses as a boy in order to provide for her widowed mother, he highlights the plight of women under that draconian regime. His awareness of the human side of history was honed early on. At age 5 he was transfixed by a showing of Lawrence of Arabia at his hometown cinema hall in Kabul. He haunted movie theaters after that, taping together remnants of filmstrips to make his own films, which he would then show to his friends in tiny...
...Opium War, Afghanistan's entry for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars and the follow-up to Barmak's Osama, which won a Golden Globe in 2004, is a black comedy. Barmak wasn't expecting the making-of story to be quite as absurd. Still, he is sanguine. "All these disasters, this struggle and search, that's what making a film is all about," says the 46-year-old director. "It's the perfect parable for Afghanistan: nothing ever works the way you think it will...
...soldiers mistake for a Taliban encampment. They open fire, setting the stage for anger and frustration. The Afghans fear the soldiers are after their opium crop, or, when one of the soldiers tries to make friends with a toddler, that the foreigners want to take their children. For Barmak, it's a thinly veiled criticism of how the U.S. has conducted its war in Afghanistan. There has been too much of a focus on the fight, he says, and not enough on development. "I wanted to show the conflict between ordinary Afghans and the foreign soldiers who don't know...
...These days Barmak spends more time courting financiers than dodging rockets. Making movies in Afghanistan is expensive, and there is no local market to speak of. Instead he relies on foreign distribution - Opium War will be screening in some 15 cities across Asia and Europe this spring, largely based on his success last fall at the Rome International Film Festival, where Opium War won the critics' award for best film. He hopes for more success - and jokes about the remote possibility of failure. "If I can't make it as a director," he says, "at least I now know...