Kandahar—Melissa Hurley

This film gave me a much better understanding of what it is like to be an average person in the Afghani culture. Like Roxanne Varzi says numerous times in her article, my only connection to Afghanistan is the war-torn images I have seen on news stations or internet sites. Many times those images contained American soldiers, so it is almost impossible to get a clear understanding of true Afghanistan from those pictures. That is where I believe this film succeeded. We were shown women, children, families, schools, homes, doctors, transportation, injured people missing limbs, along with scenes of compassion and scenes of violence. This is not what the news shows, so I feel like my eyes were opened into actually cognitively recognizing that there is more to Afghanistan than a desert tainted with war.

Although there is some critique about the emotionless countenance of Nafas, she intrigued me. Perhaps as a westerner, I am used to films in which the characters experience a roller coaster of emotions, especially women, so her calm, almost robotic manner was fascinating to me. I am extremely close to my sister so as the time was wasting away in the film, I found myself growing more and more anxious for Nafas to get to her on time, but she remained with the same eerie quietness. This allowed me to make the same connection that Varzi does when she says Nafas is symbolic of how numb all the people in Afghanistan have become. It makes sense.

I would like to question the perspective that an actual Afghani woman has. There was a large number of women in the film, yet the only woman we actually got to know was Nafas, and she was separated from the other women since she lives in Canada. I wonder what a conversation between Nafas and a woman who removed her burqa would have been like. I think it would have been powerful to see an interaction, woman to woman, about the struggles that Nafas was facing to travel to her sister in a very male-dominated country. Do the women there even have opinions? Or is it conditioned out of them in their upbringing. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have no identity to anyone else except to your husband. If Makhmalbaf was able to even just touch on this subject, the film would have been complete for me.