CREDIT: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

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Nelofer Pazira's Return to Kandahar debuts tomorrow on CBC.

Afghan-Canadian journalist Nelofer Pazira found herself in the unlikely role of movie star in 2001 after starring in Kandahar, Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf's acclaimed motion picture that became a huge hit on the film festival circuit.

Inspired by real events in Pazira's life, Kandahar lifted the veil on the plight of the people in war- and poverty-stricken Afghanistan, and particularly on the country's women and their oppression under the Taliban.

Given the events that would unfold on Sept. 11 of that year and the "war on terrorism" that ensued swiftly, what might have been just another excellent foreign flick garnered scads of media attention and thrust Pazira into the spotlight not just as an actress, but as a de facto spokesperson for a people who were suddenly of great interest to the West.

Pazira is front and centre once again in Return to Kandahar, a breathtaking and bittersweet documentary that premieres tomorrow night on the CBC.

Co-directed by Pazira and respected documentarian Paul Jay (Neverendum Referendum, Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows), Return to Kandahar trails Pazira on her first visit to her home country since she and her family left there in 1989, when she was 16 years old. (Pazira met Jay last year as a guest on CounterSpin, the CBC current-affairs show that Jay created and now executive-produces. This is where the idea for the documentary first germinated.)

Her goal on the July 2002 trip was to find her long-lost childhood friend Dyana, whose story was the basis for Kandahar, in which Pazira's fictional character returns to Afghanistan to track down her little sister, injured by a land mine and contemplating suicide to escape her crushing depression resulting from life as a woman under the Taliban.

In 1998, after years of regular correspondence, Pazira received a disturbing letter from Dyana that ended with the ominous phrase, "You'll have to live for both of us now."

The letters promptly stopped. Pazira immediately headed to Afghanistan to try to find Dyana, but Taliban forces prevented her from getting into the country.

After trying in vain for years to track down her friend's whereabouts, Pazira received word from Dyana's uncle last year that she and her family had moved from Kabul, Pazira's hometown, to Mazar-e Sharif. That crucial bit of information was all the impetus Pazira needed to try again.

But Pazira's search for Dyana, while a compelling thread throughout the film, is just part of the allure of Return to Kandahar, which becomes Pazira's thoughtful and at times harrowing search for her own history, one that brought her face-to-face with a country and people who have been scarred by war.

"When you leave a place, a curtain emerges after a period of time between the reality and what you imagine it to be," Pazira said. "Once you're physically there, that curtain automatically drops, and you're faced with a lot of realities that you might have mentally prepared yourself for, but which you've never had to deal with."

Not surprisingly, the experience of crafting the documentary contrasted sharply with that of the making of Kandahar, Pazira said, and not just in terms of logistics.

"With (Kandahar) there was a storyline and a degree of control over how things were going to unfold," Pazira said. "But with a documentary, there's that element of the unknown. You can't afford to take anything for granted. It's a real journey, and once you embark on it, the course of that journey just takes over."

While throughout the making of the documentary she experiences aspects of life that are a daily reality for Afghanis - the constant threat of land mines, warlords who have divvied up much of the country into their own personal fiefdoms, crumbling facilities and crushing poverty - Pazira said she couldn't help feeling somewhat removed from all that surrounded her.

"I have a choice, in that I have another world that I can go back to and I've still got my comfortable home in Canada," Pazira said. "But a lot of these people are stuck not only with the horrible experiences of war but also the uncertainty of the future."

Pazira's trip and her search for her friend Dyana builds to a dramatic conclusion that's best not revealed here.

But while it brings closure to one aspect of her life, Pazira vowed the denouement wouldn't diminish her journalistic interest in the fate of her country.

"In some ways, instead of resolving things for me, it brought me back into the reality of that world, and opened up many more boxes of curiosity and concern and responsibility," Pazira said. "The more you look at it and peel away layers of it, the more you discover complexities that are begging for investigation. "Symbolically, it brings one chapter of the search to a close, but it's opened so many others."

Return to Kandahar airs tomorrow night at 9 on CBMT-6.