Word: burkas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...gathering point for women from all over the city. They chat excitedly about expanding opportunities for women in the new era and are planning an even larger demonstration in the coming week. But despite the symbolic baring of their faces at the demonstration, most still arrive and leave wearing burkas. "The burka is not the main problem of women," says Parlika. "First women should find work and improve their economic situation...
...Nafas, the character she inspired--though in the film it is a sister, not a friend, she seeks to save--and the year is 1999, just before the millennium new year. In real life, Pazira only briefly penetrated Afghanistan's border. In the film, her character, shrouded in a burka and taking notes on a hidden tape recorder, is a brave, lonely figure constantly menaced by a bleak land and the day-to-day anarchy of the life she finds there...
This is most poignantly symbolized by a passage in which Nafas and her last guide, an angry, erratic older man, join an all-female party heading across the sands to a wedding. Even the man disguises himself in a burka, and the pictures of this group shrouded in costumes of many colors (Ebrahim Ghafouri's photography is the year's best) are strikingly beautiful. Yet we are also made aware of how their movements are restricted by their clothes, how they must struggle just to see and breathe. There can be no more powerful image of the sexism of theocratic...
...BURKA FASHIONS...
...streets of Kabul, you can see something these days that has not been glimpsed there for almost five years?women's faces. Now that the Taliban has fled the city, a few brave women have shed the burka?the head-to-toe garment, to Western eyes a kind of body bag for the living, made mandatory by the defeated religious leadership. Men sometimes look in astonishment at these faces, as if they were comets or solar eclipses. So do other women. From the moment in 1996 that the Taliban took power, it sought to make women not just obedient...