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Safar e Ghandehar (2001)

Safar e Ghandehar (2001)

GENRESBiography,Drama,War
LANGPersian,English,Pushto,Polish
ACTOR
Nelofer PaziraHassan TantaiIke OgutSadou Teymouri
DIRECTOR
Mohsen Makhmalbaf

SYNOPSICS

Safar e Ghandehar (2001) is a Persian,English,Pushto,Polish movie. Mohsen Makhmalbaf has directed this movie. Nelofer Pazira,Hassan Tantai,Ike Ogut,Sadou Teymouri are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2001. Safar e Ghandehar (2001) is considered one of the best Biography,Drama,War movie in India and around the world.

Nafas is a reporter who was born in Afghanistan, but fled with her family to Canada when she was a child. However, her sister wasn't so lucky; she lost her legs to a land mine while young, and when Nafas and her family left the country, her sister was accidentally left behind. Nafas receives a letter from her sister announcing that she's decided to commit suicide during the final eclipse before the dawn of the 21st century; desperate to spare her sister's life, Nafas makes haste to Afghanistan, where she joins a caravan of refugees who, for a variety of reasons, are returning to the war-torn nation. As Nafas searches for her sister, she soon gets a clear and disturbing portrait of the toll the Taliban regime has taken upon its people.

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Safar e Ghandehar (2001) Reviews

  • Like many films from Muslim countries, "Kandahar" is vitally concerned with female emancipation…

    Nazi_Fighter_David2008-12-07

    The film's great success with audiences was in part due to the timing of its release, at a moment when Afghanistan had been catapulted into the headlines by the activities of the Taliban and the attacks of September 11, 2001… But the motion picture, directed by one of Iran's most prominent film artists, is much more than a story pulled out from the headlines… It stars Nelofer Pazira, a female journalist, based in Canada, playing Nafas, who is trying to get into Afghanistan to reach her sister who lives in Kandahar… Nafas's sister is threatening suicide because of the intolerable oppression of women by the Taliban… In the course of her long and dangerous journey, Nafas encounters a mixed array of Afghan people, many of them refugees… An old man agrees to take her into the country disguised as his fourth wife… Later she acquires a young boy, Khak (Sadou Teymouri), as her guide after he has been expelled from a religious school… On the way she meets Tabib Sahid, an African-American who had come to fight the Soviets but who is now practicing medicine… "Kandahar" mixes documentary authenticity with extraordinary moments of visual strangeness ad beauty… The Burka is an ever-present symbol of women's subjugation, yet underneath women wear varnished nails and lipstick, and their brightly-colored robes affirm their individuality… The film placed the suffering of the Afghan people, particularly the women, on an international stage…

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  • fascinating pseudo-documentary film

    Buddy-512003-07-27

    When you see `Kandahar,' it's almost impossible to believe that you're watching a film set in the late 20th Century. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film takes place in Afghanistan in the latter days of the Taliban regime, when women were not merely viewed as second class citizens, but were denied any form of education or civil rights and even had to go out in public covered from head to toe to prevent men from seeing their faces. The filmmaker takes us to the heart of this alien and frightening world and makes us see, perhaps for the first time on the big screen, just how horrific life was for women in that time and place. `Kandahar' is less a narrative film than a series of fascinating vignettes that drive home the realities of life in that part of the world. What plot there is involves the efforts of a female Canadian journalist to sneak back into her native country to prevent her desperate sister in Kandahar from committing suicide at the next solar eclipse. But that is really just a string on which to hang the individual pearls that make up the film. What is of primary interest to both the filmmaker and the audience are the various people the journalist encounters and the many experiences she undergoes. Hidden beneath her own burka, she witnesses firsthand the devastating poverty, the utter degradation and de-humanization of women, and the authoritarian oppression that defined life in that country during the Taliban rule. Along the way, she meets an American doctor who is trying his hardest to in some way relieve the misery of these people, but who finds himself waging a losing battle against the primitivism and theocratic oppression that have made life a living hell for the common citizenry of the country. She also encounters a seemingly endless group of people who have become dismembered by all the land mines left over from the Afghani war with the Russians. There is one remarkable scene wherein hordes of desperate, one-legged men hobble on crutches across the desert as Red Cross helicopters rain prosthetic limbs down onto the sands below. It is merely one among many images from the film that seer themselves into the viewer's memory. Another is a scene in which a male doctor has to examine his female patients through a hole cut out of a sheet, not even being allowed to talk to the woman directly about her symptoms but having to get his information through a male (or female child) `interpreter.' Makhmalbaf keeps the ending of the film deliberately ambiguous which might frustrate some viewers but which actually adds to the verisimilitude of the piece. In the same way, much of the acting in the film borders on the amateurish at times, but again that contributes to the pseudo-documentary aura that the film must have to be truly effective. A clear-cut narrative resolution and slick performances by obviously professional actors would likely rob the film of its much-needed sense of immediacy. `Kandahar,' by providing a voice to so many voiceless people, is a film that cries out to be seen.

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  • A long strange journey into the past in the present.

    Krustallos2004-11-29

    This is an extremely beautiful film which inhabits a visual and emotional territory somewhere between Werner Herzog and Pasolini. As others have stated, the actors are non-professionals and the plot is not the stuff of Hollywood melodrama. However the images and sounds are haunting and profound. Mahkmalbaf is truly a poet of the cinema. The film does not attempt to make a political analysis of the situation of Afghanistan in 2001, but operates on a more humanistic and emotional level, showing the human consequences, the poverty both material and spiritual of life under the Taliban and the indifference of the outside world. The "doctor" character, far from being implausible, is played by a real person with a very similar history. He is also a stand-in within the film for Makhmalbaf himself, who started as an Islamic fundamentalist revolutionary but has moved towards a more open-minded humanism. The film itself describes a circle, the first scene is also the last, the sun shining through a burqa onto a woman's face. Between are unforgettable images, and a transit across a surreal and nightmarish landscape. Surrender yourself and you will really feel you have been on a journey. The UK DVD also includes "The Afghan Alphabet" a similarly fictionalised documentary on the struggle to bring education to the three million or so Afghan refugees in Iran.

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  • Interesting look - don't mind previous comment on Indian music

    Sawbone2005-06-26

    The comment on the Indian music is off base - Indian music and DVDs are common in Afghanistan as the local entertainment industry is still recovering from the Taliban. Bollywood film DVDs are sold in Kabul. Pictures and posters of Indian actresses are popular here. It isn't unusual to hear recorded Sitar music here in Kabul. Afghan and Indian music was distributed secretly at great risk during the Taliban reign. There is just not enough Afghan material yet and Afghans love music, even if they don't understand Urdu. There is a scene in the movie where an instrument is seized by the Taliban before the wedding. So the soundtrack was completely appropriate for me. Hopefully we will see a feature film made inside Afghanistan someday. Its a beautiful and fascinating place and holds fascinating stories.

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  • Philosophically confused

    paul2001sw-12004-08-23

    All cultural values are in some senses relative. We make criticise, say, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan for forcing women to wear the burka; but our own society enforces different standards with regard to the male and female exposure of the chest. We might therefore say that the burka is oppressive not so much in itself but rather as part of a system that undermines the freedom of women; but this is to assume that in our sexist, and over-sexualised, society, women are in practice freer. In fact, I believe they are; but at some level it is important to acknowledge the arbitrariness of such positions at the deepest level; that they depend on prejudice (to use that word non-prejudicially), on values rather than reason. To argue that because we know nothing for certain we should therefore do nothing, think nothing is a doctrine of futile despair; but to be aware of the limitations of our own thinking, to know that for certain future generations will surely condemn us are clearly as we condemn others, is vital before we consider the values of societies other than our own, a secular equivalent of humility before God. This is not to say I would like to see a film defending the appalling Taliban. But even the most tyrannical regime is in some regards the product of the society it tyrannises: we are all both prisoners and guards. To understand that regime (and its true horrors), one needs to understand how it worked with, as well as against, the grain of traditional society; and what is good, as well as what is bad, about that. Unfortunately, this is not what we get with 'Kandahar'. It's a shame, because this film contains the potential material for exploring the ambiguity of life. Its central character is rude, arrogant and ambitious (a journalist travelling to Afghanistan to try and save her sister, she doesn't hesitate to try to try and make a story out of her ordeal at the same time). A returning exile, she might be considered as both having the right to criticise what is happening to her country and also the eyes of one who has seen enough to know what is wrong. But one could just as easily say that she has neither that in fact she has the rights to neither position. There is thus the potential to portray her with great ambivalence; but 'Kandahar' prefers the values of propaganda. So instead she is our witness, our seer and our reliable narrator; and the film is all the weaker for it. 'Kandahar' contains some great footage of a bleak but beautiful country, but at times its limited budget shows. The dialgoue is strange, the second most important character is (bizarrely) an American, and a number of the scenes sit uneasily between documentary and fiction: Michael Winterbottom did something similar in 'In This World', but that film was more convincing, because the agenda of the director was less clumsily imposed on every scene. 'Kandahar' has neither documentary truth or dramatic ambiguity; and seems to view the world with a very Western slant. Perhaps evil is like Schroedinger's cat: something that can be labelled or shown, but not both at the same time. 'Kandahar' prefers to label; but I prefer more subtlety in my films.

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