Unhappy homecoming

BY JASON ANDERSON

When Afghan-Canadian journalist Nelofer Pazira collaborated with Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf to make a movie called Kandahar two years ago, the suffering of Afghans living under Taliban rule was receiving little international attention. Preoccupied with the potential for peace and profit in the new century, much of the Western world couldn't have cared less about a country that had pounded itself back to the Middle Ages.

As Pazira wrote about the making of Kandahar in the July, 2001 issue of Sight and Sound, "My reason for making this film was to tell the story of a people's devastation and a country's destruction. Divided along ethnic, linguistic and tribal lines, laid low by mistrust and past betrayals, unwilling to forgive and hardened by a life of exile, these people's lives reflect the state of their war-shattered country."

The cruel irony is that those words seem equally true of Afghanistan now as they did before the events of 9/11 provoked the West to create yet more rubble, and then leave the Afghans to clean it up when the frontlines of the war on terror moved elsewhere.

Now, Pazira has made another unsettling film about Afghanistan. Co-directed by Paul Jay, Return to Kandahar debuts as part of Hot Docs' Doc Soup series on Wednesday, March 12. (It also airs on CBC TV on March 27). The new movie depicts the homecoming for Pazira that never actually occurred in Kandahar. Though set in Afghanistan, Makhmalbaf's film was shot on the Iranian border among Afghan refugees and consisted of fictionalized incidents and characters (such as an American exile played, much to the surprise of US authorities, by the prime suspect in the 1980 murder of an Iranian diplomat). Pazira's character Nafas wanted to reach her sister in Kandahar before she could commit suicide. Here, Pazira struggles to discover the real-life fate of her childhood friend Dyana, who contemplated the same escape.

Though both films are dominated by Pazira's narration, Return to Kandahar's makers largely forgo the wry, poetic style of Makhmalbaf's work. Instead, Pazira and Jay's hour-long film is closer to such unflinching docs as Jung (War): In the Land of the Mujaheddin and Beneath the Veil. With Jay's crew in tow, Pazira searches the cities of Kabul, Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif for news of Dyana and traces of the country Pazira and her family fled for Canada in 1989. She remarks how a square in Kabul had giant posters of Madonna and Michael Jackson, totems that represented "our connection to the Western world." The sight of her school library liquidated of its contents feels "as if someone has personally betrayed me."

To discover Dyana's whereabouts, she asks for help from the warlords who have returned to settling the grudges that fuelled the civil war. She also visits a university campus, where a few brave women are once again exercising their right to education despite the hostility of many male classmates. All the while, Pazira notes with a bemused but bitter air that if Dyana is hiding underneath a burqa, she could be impossible to find.

Earnest, articulate and angry, Pazira is a compelling commentator on Afghanistan's latest batch of miseries, which she perceives to have less to do with the Taliban than Cold War-era geopolitics. And even though Return to Kandahar lacks the grace of its celebrated predecessor, the fate of Pazira's quest makes it just as heart-rending.