Word: barmak
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...Samira Makhmalbaf's filmmaking father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf?who directed the superb, Afghan-set Kandahar (2001)?helped finance Sedigh Barmak's Osama, the hit of the Directors' Fortnight. Set in the early days of Taliban rule and based on a true story, it tells of an 11-year-old girl whose mother sends her out with a short haircut and long robes to find work as a "boy" and support the family. It's a reckless ruse, one with potentially fatal consequences. The girl is taken to the men-only prayer ritual, and attends instruction by a mullah in the proper...
...eyes that caught Sedigh Barmak's attention. The 40-year-old director of Osama, one of two Cannes entries about Afghanistan, needed the right girl to play his lead. Barmak was seeking someone with whom Afghans could identify, someone who would make his audience "feel confident about themselves, to prove to them that they are human again." He combed Kabul's schools and orphanages in vain. Then came a chance street encounter. A young girl in a tattered salwar kameez approached him, begging for money. "Her eyes," says Barmak, "were like an explosion of light." Marina Golbahari had never acted...
...Barmak found his star, and, in Barmak, the Afghan movie industry may have discovered its savior. Osama is the first Afghan feature film to be made in Afghanistan since the Taliban rolled into Kabul in 1996, torching theaters, shutting down Barmak's studio and burning thousands of reels of film. "It was like they were burning a human body," he says. "I was beyond depression...
...Movies have always stirred intense emotions in Barmak. "The first time I went to see a movie was with my father. I saw a line of light from a very small hole fill the entire screen. I had to know what was behind the light." When the projectionist was out on a cigarette break, Barmak grabbed his chance and ducked into the projection room. From that moment on, he knew he had to make films. "It was not only a dream," he recalls. "It was a crazy moment of love...
...McNamara make his nuanced, self-critical apologia for his decisions in a war that killed 56,000 Americans and 60 times as many Vietnamese. It's a must-see, especially for Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. The shroud of international evildoing covers two excellent films set in Afghanistan. Sedigh Barmak's Osama takes place in the early days of Taliban rule: to earn money for her family, a desperate woman disguises her 11-year-old daughter as a boy. It is a reckless ruse, one with humiliating consequences, which Barmak directs with poignant simplicity. Samira Makhmalbaf's At Five...