In the western Afghan city of Herat, where there are no cinemas and women only venture outside wearing head-to-toe veils, Rahima, Rita, Mariam and Monirah are women of ill repute.
But in following their dreams to become actresses in a country where just five years ago film and theatre were banned under the Taliban government, the women are mavericks trying to bring culture to their war-ravaged homeland.
”To be an actress in Afghanistan doesn’t bring you anything but a bad reputation,” says Rita Hosseini.
”But someone has to do it. What is a country without culture, without stories to make us dream, without cinema?” asks the widow who tints her hair and lines her almond eyes with dark kohl.
Hosseini, who is raising two young children alone, makes her living as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Acting, she says, is just for fun. ”Cinema is for art and for pleasure,” she says.
It is a pleasure that few women enjoy, even at the theatres operating in the capital, Kabul. And for these actresses, it is a pleasure that sometimes carries a high price.
In the cramped office of the local production house of the government’s Afghan Film, Mariam Hachemi says she once attempted suicide to avoid being forced to give up acting and marry a man she considered ”too poor”.
”Some cousins and a brother have cut all relations with me,” she says.
Culture
The director of Afghan Film in Herat, Fridoon Faghery, says: ”The problem is our government, which does not give any importance to culture. Movies, culture, these are the best way to advance mindsets and to change the way men look at women. But we do not have the money and have to work with outdated equipment.”
The office has in the past two years produced about 20 films for television, Faghery says. Sitting on a sagging sofa among a group of actors and actresses, he deplores that this city, ”at the peak of culture for centuries”, now does not even have a single cinema.
The one that did exist was destroyed, like most across the country, during the 1992-1996 civil war between ethnic factions headed by warlords who were sometimes as conservative as the notoriously repressive Taliban militia.
Once they had control, the Taliban banned television and cinema, and generally terrorised the majority of Afghan people with an ultra-purist set of rules that were violently imposed until the hard-liners were forced out by a United States-led coalition in 2001.
Cinema revival
Afghans have since taken to cinema once again, with Indian Bollywood musicals constantly broadcast on television and shown in the cinemas of Kabul, with the Hindi language widely understood.
In Herat, a city of 250 000 people on the border with Iran, it is Iranian cinema that inspires Monirah Hachemi. She encountered it as a child in a refugee camp in the neighbouring country.
”I returned in 2004. I don’t regret it. Conditions for women are better in Iran, but only for Iranian women,” laughs the 21-year-old, who heads the Cinematographic Association of Women in Herat, the only one of its kind in Afghanistan.
The association, which is part of Afghan Film, was established a year ago to nurture Afghan actresses and has 31 members, she says.
”It is seen as very bad to be an actress in Afghanistan. It is considered bad for a woman, but I believe what I do is pure. And I am lucky because my parents support me,” Monirah says.
She also has ambitions to become a director.
Specifically, she dreams of putting into film the story of a friend who committed suicide at the age of 15 because her parents tried to force her to marry a man 30 years her senior. — AFP
