With the help of an Irish producer, Siddiq Barmak has made the first Afghanfeature since the fall of the Taliban - and won a Golden Globe. James Meek meets him
Afghan Film is a dingy mid-century block in a small compound in central Kabul. It is in a security zone. Outside, a fat German soldier in a scarlet beret directs traffic away from a road accident. The new year has wrapped the worn-out city in a cold gauze of wood smoke and exhaust fumes. Blankets for overcoats and woollen hats are only partial comfort when there aren't enough socks to go round.
The director Siddiq Barmak strides in, bringing with him the warmth of success. His film Osama, the first Afghan feature to be made since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, has sold worldwide after a good reception at Cannes last year, where it picked up a special mention for the Camera d'Or. It also won a Golden Globe last month for best foreign-language film.
Barmak's colleagues at Afghan Film are demonstratively fond of him, as provider and talisman of better times. People come and go from his office while we talk. They seem like people who would, in the Russian manner, bring their boss flowers on his birthday. Barmak rips through a pile of post. He studies a certificate from the eighth International Film Festival of Kerala, naming Osama best film in the competition section. "I didn't know I'd won that," he says, grinning.
Osama, Barmak's first full-length feature film, is a self-contained tragedy about a young girl forced by her mother and grandmother to dress as a boy in order to find work in Taliban-controlled Kabul. Her deception is discovered, with cruel consequences. In Afghanistan, where the film has had short runs in three of the Kabul cinemas still standing, it cannot escape being viewed through the cracked lens of politics, language and residual suspicion that is the legacy of two decades of war.
Like every Afghan, Barmak is a survivor, and he has survived only through making the hardest choices: whether to study film in Moscow while the Soviets were occupying his country (he went to Moscow), when to flee and when to return (he fled and returned twice) and, as an ethnic Tajik and Dari speaker, which of Afghanistan's two predominant languages he should make his film in: Pashto or Dari. He chose Dari. The war generation has divided the country so that languages have come to be seen as badges of allegiance: Dari to the West, to Russia, the US and Iran, to secularism; Pashto to the south, to Pakistan, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalism. I had barely arrived in Kabul before I met a member of the Kabul intelligentsia complaining that Osama was too "Iranian".
Barmak is an optimist, and I never saw him more downcast in the time we spent together than in contemplating the likelihood that in its homeland his anti-Taliban film would be considered by many as a Dari film aimed against Pashto speakers - even though the most prominent Taliban character, a mullah who takes an unwholesome interest in the child heroine, speaks Dari. "All lines go through politics now in Afghanistan. Now, even if young people love each other, they look at the love through the smoke of war."
One of the places where Osama was shown in Kabul was the decrepit Park cinema, on the drab square of Shahre Naw Park, in a street of kebab joints and juice bars. It ran for a week, with a special screening for women and children.The Park is significant in Barmak's life. It was here he saw his first film, Lawrence Of Arabia, in 1967, when he was five. It was in front of the Park, almost 30 years later, that he came across the Taliban burning film reels, full 35 m.m. spools of Afghan films, a few days after they took Kabul. The burning reels left black circles scorched on the paving slabs that haven't yet been washed away.
In his mid-teens Barmak acquired a second-hand 8 m.m. camera and projector and made short clips. On a bus trip to Kandahar in 1978, when he was 16, he struck lucky. His seatmate was a successful film actor who suggested he called in to Afghan Film when he returned to Kabul. Barmak got a job as a sound recordist, became a second assistant director on a feature and made his first 8 m.m. short, about a group of young billiard players.
After the Soviet invasion in 1979 he was a natural candidate for a scholarship being offered at Moscow's VGIK film schoo. He studied in Moscow from 1981 to 1987, acquiring fluent Russian and a love of Russian cinema, especially Tarkovsky. His graduation film, The Outsider, was a 40-minute feature, the most ambitious he was able to complete before Osama, 16 years later. It describes how a peasant takes bloody revenge after the local farm boss forces him to let his wife sing for a foreign folklorist. After a single screening the film was banned by Afghanistan's puppet government as anti-Soviet.
When Barmak returned to Kabul in 1987 he clashed with the censors again. Conscripted into a propaganda film unit, he made a documentary about an officer who lost a hand and a leg fighting the mujahedeen in southern Afghanistan. The officer goes home to Herat, in the west of the country, to find his parents killed by Soviet bombs and his fiancée rejecting him because of his wounds. The film was banned, and Barmak was sent to the front line. He deserted to Ahmed Shah Massoud's mujahedeen in the Panjshir valley, north of Kabul. Though the 1990s saw him marry and have a son and daughter, he produced no movies. He travelled the world, trying to raise money. He came back to Kabul in 1992 with the victorious mujahedeen, hoping to begin an Afghan film revival, only to see the victors turn on each other and pound much of the city to rubble, killing tens of thousands of civilians, before the Taliban moved in to exploit the residents' despair.
The story of Osama is based on a patchwork of real events, originally put together by Barmak while he was working for the BBC in Pakistan but modified when he returned to Kabul. The heroine, played in the film by 12-year-old Marina Golbahari, was to have disguised herself as a boy in order to go to school, as in the newspaper report that inspired Barmak to write his scenario. When the director returned to Kabul in February 2002 he found that the Taliban's ban on women working was more immediately brutal than their ban on women learning, as it put war widows at risk of starvation - so he changed the script. The character of the lascivious mullah, meanwhile, was based on a Taliban mullah who had a daily show on Kabul radio, always with the same lesson: the correct way for men to wash their penises.
Out in the ruined west of the city, where most of the film was shot, the traffic jams that clog the centre thin out. In the film Barmak strips out the clutter of semi-modernity, the cars and shop signs and street traders with which central Kabul seethed under the Taliban, as now. Among the dust and ruins of the outskirts, characters and objects take on an elemental, fabular quality, like the great heavy scissors with which the heroine's hair is cut. There is a stylistic echo in Osama of the "Afghan" films by the Iranian Makhmalbaf dynasty - father Mohsen's Kandahar and daughter Samira's At Five In The Afternoon. Both offer a somewhat exaggerated vision of Afghanistan as a wholly demechanised wasteland. But Barmak could not have made Osama without Mohsen Makhmalbaf's help: the Iranian director invested thousands of dollars in the film, lent Barmak his Arriflex camera and encouraged him in the sending-out of the film treatment, which resulted in money from Japan and from the Dublin-based producers Julie LeBroqcuy and Julia Fraser.
Barmak used amateur actors in his film, scouring Kabul for potential cast members. One penalty of using non-professionals is that while their immortalised celluloid selves go on to win glory in cinemas in the wider world the real people have returned to their grimmer real lives and remain in Kabul to haunt him. This is particularly true of Marina Golbahari, whose portrayal of the frightened girl, given the name Osama and thrown into a boy's world, makes the film so memorable. While headlines in the Western press saying that she has gone "back to the gutter" are exaggerated, her feelings about the role, and the opportunities it gave her, are complex.
I saw Marina at the centre for street children where she now attends classes every afternoon - in itself a big improvement in her life. A tiny, shy girl in a green headscarf, she does not answer questions directly but whispers, smiling, to the woman who heads the centre, in such a way that when Marai, our photographer, translates the answer it is hard to know whether it is Marina talking, or the woman (who thinks Barmak should give more money to the centre) or the voice of Marina's poverty-stricken family of 12 (who are angry that Afghan Film has stopped paying Marina's father the $100-a-month stipend he has been receiving until now). Barmak has bought Marina a small, rough-and-ready house, but the family is still poor, and Marina's salary on the film - about €10 a day - has been spent. Marina says that, contrary to Barmak's account, it is not true that she was begging when Barmak met her or that she had never seen a film before. She's glad she made the film but doesn't like the way she is turned into a boy. Life, she says, is better than it was before but not as good as she had hoped. She goes back into the classroom and smiles as she waves goodbye.
Barmak hopes to show Osama in cinemas in other parts of Afghanistan before releasing it to Afghan television. But he does not hide the fact that the film is addressed to a global audience. "I really wanted the première to be in Cannes. I wanted to show Afghanistan to the world, because I don't think the international media caught the reality of what happened here."
Harsh as Osama is, it is often beautiful to watch. One scene, of a crowd of women in identical blue burkas streaming down a slope, was intended by Barmak as the realisation of a line of poetry whose source he cannot remember: "Blue rivers coming from the blue sky." There are also moments of comedy, as when a wedding party instantly transforms itself into a funeral party at the Taliban's approach. That is the way Barmak's thoughts are turning for his next project. "I'm working on two scripts," he says. "One script is about the past, the other is about the future. Now I'm walking between the past and the future. I think both scripts should be comedies. I really want to see our people laughing." ...
Osama is being screened at 6 p.m. today as part of Dublin International Film Festival; the screening is at at the Irish Film Institute, where Osama opens next Friday
