Return to Kandahar shocking, suspenseful

Tony Atherton
The Ottawa Citizen
24 March 2003
Ottawa Citizen
 

On Sept. 8, 2001, an Ottawa journalist-turned-movie-star sat in a swank hotel suite luxuriating in the kudos of critics at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was an echo of the acclaim that her film, Kandahar, a striking drama about an Afghan-Canadian woman's journey into Taliban-occupied Afghanistan in search of her suicidal sister, had received several months earlier at Cannes.

But, as much as Nelofer Pazira appreciated the praise, and as much as she welcomed the attention it had drawn to the plight of her homeland, she couldn't forget the woman whose real-life desperation in the thrall of religious fundamentalism had set in motion the whole unlikely project.

Some day, she told the journalists, she would go back to Afghanistan to complete the quest that she had been forced to abandon in reality, only to take up in fiction. Some day, she would find her childhood friend, the one she hadn't heard from in years, the one whose last letter read like a bitter farewell.

Three days later, calamitous events in New York turned the eyes of the entire world upon Afghanistan. Five months after that, the Taliban were no more.

In the meantime, Pazira had become -- "by default," she says -- a kind of spokesperson for the voiceless women of Afghanistan, an observer with a distinct point of view eagerly sought out by the media early in the war on terrorism. In that role last March, she appeared as a guest on the Newsworld series CounterSpin, where she met the show's producer, Paul Jay, an award-winning documentary filmmaker. The meeting would prove fateful.

On Thursday at 9 p.m., CBC premieres the one-hour documentary Return to Kandahar, a compelling account of Pazira's attempt last summer to complete the quest she had aborted in 1998, the search for her missing friend. It is a tale of twists and turns as suspenseful as any drama, but it is also a shocking portrait of a nation still reeling from years of war, resistance and oppression. And it leads to a surprising denouement.

The broadcast of Return to Kandahar follows tonight's TV premiere of the movie Kandahar, airing at 8 p.m. on CBC.

Pazira left Afghanistan 13 years ago when she was 16 and the country was still occupied by the Soviet Union. Restrictions on freedom had landed her activist father in trouble with authorities, but the country had been relatively modern in its outlook on education, dress and manners. She had grown up happily with her best friend Dyana, who had been heartbroken when Pazira had to leave.

The two corresponded for years, but in 1996 the tenor of the correspondence changed. After years of factional fighting following the Soviet withdrawal, the fundamentalist Taliban had seized control of the country, and had immediately banished western influences, returning Afghanistan to ancient practices that were particularly restrictive on the women. Young Taliban zealots forced Dyana to give up her job. She was severely limited in her movements and made to feel subhuman.

Her letters to Pazira became more and more despairing until March of 1996, when she wrote to tell her friend she must live for them both. Alarmed by what she read between the lines, the 24-year-old Pazira left immediately for Iran, hoping to somehow cross the border into her homeland and rescue her friend.

It was a naive enterprise. She got no further than two hours into the hinterland of northern Afghanistan when conditions forced her back to Iran. But the trip did introduce her to a sympathetic Iranian, filmmaker Moshen Makmalbaf. Two years later, Makmalbaf would convince her to star in a fictionalized account of the journey into Afghanistan that she had never made. She played an Afghan-Canadian named Nafas who returns to the Taliban-controlled country to find her younger sister. Like Dyana, the fictitious sister had become desperate under the repressive rule. The film was shot entirely in Iran.

In the meantime, Pazira's constant inquiries about Dyana had yielded some comfort. An uncle wrote that the family had moved from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif. They had perhaps found some relief there, Pazira hoped. She later learned Dyana's uncle had lied, but not until she was well into her return journey to Afghanistan with Paul Jay.

Return to Kandahar begins in Kabul, where Pazira and Dyana had grown up. Pazira is devastated by the changes wrought by war and fundamentalism; her battle-scarred house, her school library stripped of its books, its students still swaddled in tent-like burkas.

"It doesn't matter how much you prepare yourself theoretically or intellectually for that reality, it is never like actually seeing it," she said in an interview. "The moment I arrived, that wall of protection (from shock) that I had created through analysis and political understanding, it just disappeared. It was not there, and the emotions basically took over."

Through Pazira's experience, Return to Kandahar drives home how drastically Afghanistan's development has dropped since the 1980s, and how little has been done to renew the nation since Allied troops overran it last year. Her search takes her to Kandahar, the Taliban's original stronghold, where the graves of Arab al-Qaeda fighters are venerated like those of Catholic saints.

She moves on to Mazer, negotiating roads blocked by landmines, and parlaying with warlords whose heavily armed private armies still control much of the country.

And she struggles to extract fact from fiction as she chases leads about Dyana's family.

The intrigue mounts as her journey reaches a dramatic conclusion.

But the film's crisis comes earlier, when Pazira is confronted by male students at the university in Mazer. Women can attend the school now, but they still wear burkas to class. Pazira's interest in their thoughts about the new Afghanistan offend their male classmates. "We do not want our women filmed," they say, which leads to a wild debate between Pazira and the jostling crowd of intense young men.

The students wore western clothes, but bore "absolutely a Taliban mentality," says Pazira. "In a way it challenged my own perception because I had constantly been saying, education is the key (to progress)."

But she takes heart that the volatile confrontation did not lead to the violence that marked the earlier regime.

"Whenever you can begin to have dialogue and communicate your differences, and you haven't resorted to violence, there is hope," she says. "That is something I saw as a metaphor of something positive that could happen with the next generation of Afghans."