Ally Headings - Kandahar

Kandahar was not my most favorite movie I’ve ever seen. I was confused throughout the majority of the film, and the way it ended just made me ask more questions. It felt as though it was a series of scenes tied together by the main character, Nafas. Varzi writes a perfect description of my thoughts on page 933, “He is not after stories, but scenes. Maybe what Afghanistan needs is a thick description, a story, some time spent talking to the people. Perhaps the problem is not that Afghanistan is without image, but that it is many images, which create more curiosity and questions than answers.” I love human interaction, I love hearing feelings of people or a group of people and that’s a big thing that lacked in this film for me. The plot of Nafas journeying to her sister isn’t bad, it just wasn’t portrayed very well on film in my opinion. I wish the filmmaker had showed more character development. We only get a glimpse of who these characters are, and I think that’s what I liked the least in the film. Varzi says in the article that, “Apart from the facts and circumstances given in the film we are not provided with the personal context for the characters to understand their motivation” (932). Varzi’s critic of this film is almost parallel with mine. I agreed with a lot of what she had to say.

I found what Varzi said about surrealism very interesting. She begs the question, “Is reality more intense when it is surrealized?” In this film, maybe it is. She speaks of the part when the one-legged men are running to retrieve plastic legs falling from the sky. I’m pretty sure that would never happen, but it made me feel desperation for the men, which was the only emotional response I had to the film.