Kandahar seemed an important film when it premiered at Cannes in summer
2001; in the light of subsequent events, it's become vital. A fiction /
documentary hybrid, it charts a perilous journey made through
Afghanistan by a Canadian woman of Afghan origin (Pazira) in search of a
sister who stayed behind. She travels through a land ravaged by
history, and meets people barely living through it – women imprisoned
and invisible in head-to-toe burqas; men crippled by the land-mines
hidden everywhere, even in toy dolls. Some of the English dialogue is
stilted, but the images are incredible, and the whole film is informed
by Makhmalbaf's blazing, visionary humanitarianism.
