Word: barmak
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...plot of Siddiq Barmak's Osama sounds like a twist on an old story. It's an unsentimental Yentl or--considering the eerie resemblance of Osama's Marina Golbahari to Hilary Swank--an Afghan Boys Don't Cry. In 2001 Iran produced a similar fable, Baran, set among illegal Afghan refugees in Tehran. But life has ways of imitating art. Osama, the first feature made in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power, is based on a true story. And truth shines through every frame, thanks to Barmak's storytelling skill and his young star's unaffected radiance...
...film like this from a country like Afghanistan might seem a curiosity. It is more like a miracle. When the Taliban took over in 1996, it torched theaters, burned thousands of reels of film. Barmak, then head of the state-run Afghan Film Organization, fled Kabul and made documentaries for Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud (later assassinated by al-Qaeda). After the regime's overthrow, he returned to make educational films for the illiterate majority and toured the country with eight cinema caravans, which also screened old Chaplin and Keaton comedies. "Our technical guys cried," he says...
...Barmak started by gathering scraps of discarded filmstrip from the garbage bins of movie theaters, taping them together and putting on screenings for his friends. "I even charged them," he chuckles. His passion earned him a scholarship to Moscow's prestigious All-Union State Cinema Institute in 1981 (Afghanistan was then under Soviet control), and a decade later he landed the directorship of the government-run Afghan Film Studio in Kabul. When the Taliban took the city, Barmak fled to the north, where he made documentaries for the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was later assassinated...
...shambles of his old studio, Barmak brought together his old colleagues to create educational films-about health, about land mines, about rebuilding the country. "So much of Afghanistan is illiterate," says Barmak. "The only way to teach people is through movies." Most of the venues suitable for screening films had been destroyed, so he took his movies on the road. He dispatched eight teams of projectionists around the country in what he calls cinema caravans-cars loaded with video projectors, amplifiers and screens-which stopped in every town to show not only the educational films but also old classics such...
...Like many Afghan returnees, Barmak has faith in his people's ability to rebuild the country. But as with Osama, which was produced with funding from Ireland, Iran and Japan, he knows they will need a lot of help. Movies, he says, will play their part: "They can give Afghans a mirror with which to restore their sense of identity." In a way, Barmak has already achieved that for his people. When he shows Osama on his next mobile-cinema sortie, he might just inspire a whole new generation of filmmakers. In a land where darkness reigned for so long...