She’d been worried by the tone of her best friend’s letters for a while, but in April 1998 Nelofer Pazira received one that sent her straight to the Afghan border.
Dyana had written that Nelofer should live for both of them; her own life in Kabul, under Taliban rule, was no longer worth living. Pazira, worried that Dyana intended to kill herself, came all the way from Canada to stop her. Kandahar, the most recent film by director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is based on her story, and Pazira, a Canadian student and documentary-maker, is its star.
Set — but not shot — in Afghanistan, Kandahar had already been awarded the Ecumenical Jury prize at Cannes when the World Trade Centre attacks made Afghanistan the country everybody suddenly wanted to know about. Kandahar has since been sold to more than 40 countries, and held the top screen average at the Italian box office — ahead of AI and Moulin Rouge — and last month President George Bush made an urgent request for a screening.
Pazira has spoken at screenings all over the world and it’s been reported that she is a Unesco candidate for the post of cultural ambassador to Afghanistan.
Nelofer Pazira (her first name means “water lily,” her surname “to accept”) lives with her parents in a nondescript suburb of Ottawa. She’s confident, intense, a fast and highly articulate talker. Her accent sounds like it might be French, but she doesn’t speak much of Canada’s second language; her first language is Dari (a version of Farsi). She also speaks Urdu and learned English in 1991.
Pazira grew up in the middle-class Sharenow neighbourhood of Kabul, where her father was a doctor and her mother taught Persian literature, and where Dyana also lived. “[President Ahmadzai Najibullah’s communist regime] was, for me, what the Taliban seems to be for some people, because at that time my father would frequently be sent to jail for his outspokenness against the government,” she says. “You couldn’t say anything.”
By 1989, when Nelofer was 16, they’d had enough. The family walked for 10 days into Pakistan, where they stayed for a year before ending up in Moncton, New Brunswick. Dyana was one of the few who knew about their leaving and she and Pazira kept in touch for the next nine years.
While Pazira got a degree in English and journalism, and then embarked on a masters, Dyana trained as an economist and worked in a bank until she, along with all other Afghan women, was sent home for good, and sank into depression.
Receiving Dyana’s final letter made her “quite desperate”, says Pazira. She’d been to Iran before, to do field work in the Afghan refugee camps, and remembered a family she’d met then. “They said they were willing and happy to help me” and they did cross the border into Afghanistan briefly, except that — and this is said in exactly the same level, unsurprised tone — “their family members were being tortured by the Taliban at that moment”.
Forced to look for aid elsewhere, she thought of Mohsen Makhmalbaf; she’d been impressed by the sympathy for Afghan refugees displayed in his 1987 film The Cyclist, and went to see him.
Unfortunately, he knew almost nothing about Afghanistan. Stymied again, she returned to Canada.
More than a year later Makhmalbaf tracked her down and asked her to come back to Iran immediately, he needed her help on a film. He’d adapted her story slightly: a Canadian journalist goes to rescue her sister, a landmine victim in Kandahar who has threatened suicide on the last eclipse of the millennium.
Pazira went and was amazed at how much Makhmalbaf had learned about Afghanistan in the interval; he’d even taken a secret, eye-opening trip into the country. For two and a half months they filmed in the small refugee village of Niatak on the Iranian border, along what they soon discovered was a dangerous smuggler’s route through the desert. The sand dunes would not look out of place in Lawrence of Arabia, but they are only three years old; wheat used to grow there, and a river has left only a path of white marble.
Apart from Pazira, the cast consists of villagers, which made for a couple of problems. First, “they didn’t have proper drinking water and they didn’t have electricity and everybody was sick”. So Pazira and Makhmalbaf commandeered a doctor and distributed medicine. One of the women they found starving — she’s not ill, said the doctors, just give her food — became a character in Kandahar.
There are very few films involving Afghanistan — some Russian and mujahedin propaganda flicks, Rambo III, the James Bond film The Living Daylights and The Cyclist — and TV, movies and photography are banned in Afghanistan, anyway. The locals had never seen a film, so Makhmalbaf set up a screening room and showed them what moving pictures were all about.
Then, when they were finally ready to start, their cast balked. Three different tribes who had lived separated by mountains in Afghanistan now lived in the same small village. They wouldn’t speak to each other. And the women could not be filmed without their burkas and their husbands.
For hours each morning, Pazira — whose command of Dari was invaluable — and Makhmalbaf went from house to house reassuring their jittery cast members. Vigilante groups operating nearby meant they had to change location daily and Makhmalbaf disguised himself as a local.
There’s a great scene in Kandahar in which two women, entirely enveloped in black burkas, share a tube of lipstick and a mirror. The outside world may not be able to see the results, but they’re determined. Pazira, a practising Muslim, wears a burka throughout the film. She’d worn one before, but only occasionally.
“Of course, you cannot breathe. That was my first reaction.” (Her character is called Nafas, “to breathe”.) Burkas are light, but unmanageable; you can’t see your feet and Pazira kept tripping over.
“But as the time went by, I got used to it. Then one day we were walking in the desert, there were a few guys standing watching. I pulled it down. I said to myself, ‘What an idiot you are! Why are you doing this? Nobody’s forcing you to cover your face.’ So I put it up again and a few more steps and a few more people looking and I pulled it down.
“It was then I realised what a psychologically damaging thing it is, because it makes you feel incompetent. You lose your self-confidence. And you don’t have to think about your identity any more.”
Which is, of course, exactly the effect the Taliban intend: Pazira has interviewed senior Taliban officials on their ideas about women for a film. “They feel, sincerely, that women are weak creatures who need to be protected. Although they have been given rights by God, it’s the man who has to delegate those rights. Women are good as mothers and wives. They told me that the value of a woman is like a thousand rupee note that is very precious and they want to tuck it in their shirt and keep it underneath instead of putting it in a surface pocket.”
Makhmalbaf and Pazira were determined that there would be no violence in Kandahar, but the film is saturated in the results of violence; “even the games are violent”. One of the unnerving things Makhmalbaf has caught is how, in a country that allows almost no kind of relaxation, games and menace intertwine.
Girls are taught not to pick up dolls, as they might be landmines; plastic legs drift down from relief helicopters by parachute, men on crutches lurch towards them in a grim three-legged race. Pazira tells of an Afghan men’s game called buzkashi. It’s rather like polo — horseriders vie for a dead goat soaked in water — but with a particularly Afghan twist: you play as an individual, against everyone else.
It’s the individual plight that Kandahar highlights, not the political. Makhmalbaf has said that he wanted to make the film because “Afghanistan barely exists” to the rest of the world. But that was before September 11. “I feel that the film has found a different meaning now,” says Pazira. “Now that the world has paid attention, the context in which Afghanistan should be understood is lacking.”
She is passionately against the bombing and believes that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, which are fighting proxy wars in Afghanistan with India and Iran respectively, should simply have been asked to stop arming the Taliban.
A year ago she discovered that Dyana was still alive, but since then there has been silence. Pazira would like to get back to her master’s thesis (it’s on Afghan women refugees and how the dynamic between husband and wife changes when the man can no longer provide). But for now she feels she has an important role to play, explaining Afghanistan and making sure people take away from the film the humanitarian idea that Afghans are barred from basic cultural and economic advances, devastated and tired of war.