BY GEOFF PEVERE

A couple of years ago, historical coincidence transformed Moshen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar from a marginal art house release into something of an event. The story of a Canadian journalist's return to the country where she was born Taliban run Afghanistan in search of a sister she feared may kill her self, the just released movie took on monumental resonance after the events of Sept. 11,2001.

For many viewers, it represented not just the only nonofficial glimpse into the country and regime that incubated the terrorist mind set that toppled the World Trade Centre, it was the first glimpse. But it was a skewed one. Because the celebrated Iranian filmmaker Makhmalbaf is as much an artist as a reporter, his film offered not so much a window on pre9/11 Afghanistan as a prism through which to view it.

Partly a semi-fictionalized reconstruction of the real life Nelofer Pazira's unsuccessful attempts to enter the country in search of her friend who became, for some reason, her sister in the film and partly a document of the complex interplay of cultural, religious, economic and political forces defining life on that parched soil, the movie was as deliberately enigmatic as it was informative. For every question it illuminated, it raised many more.

Return To Kandahar, in which Pazira attempts to complete the mission to find the childhood friend from whom she last heard in 1998, is a considerably more straight ahead journalistic affair. Co-directing with filmmaker Paul Jay, Pazira leads a crew through a country that, while liberated from the extremist yoke of the Taliban, remains a place of hardship, contradiction and devastation. With the search for Pazira's lost friend Dyanna functioning as the film's narrative foundation. Return To Kandahar is like a road trip through a war zone.

Starting in the city of Kabul, where she visits the remains of the home her family left for Canada in 1989, Pazira moves across the desert to Kandahar. Along the way, she talks with several people peasants, students, soldiers, warlords about life in Afghanistan since the American routing of the fundamentalist Islamic regime.

What she finds is a country still every bit as volatile and potentially explosive as the landmines that remain a terrifying fixture beneath the soil. Thousands of displaced Afghanis continue to wander homeless, women still face huge amounts of unyielding gender oppression, and none of the billions of dollars in promised foreign aid have yet arrived.

Thus, Pazira asks the obvious: What kind of future does Afghanistan have? And what will its relationship be to a world that seems once again to have abandoned it to suffering?

Probing and impassioned (you should see Pazira take on a group of men trying to prevent her from filming female university students) Return To Kandahar is not only essential supplemental viewing for those who've seen Kandahar, it also comes at a time of fortuitous historical coincidence.

As a film that documents what happens in a country when the foreign armies leave and the world press pack up and go home, it commands our attention ever bit as much as its predecessor.