The Beauty of Film

               When reading the article Picturing Change: Mohsen Makhmalbaf's "Kandahar"  by  Roxanne Varzia, a particular line stuck out to me, “Some things are too powerful to show as images, they need to be conveyed differently, they need other images to stand for and tame them, to manipulate the same emotion without disgusting and without turning to clichés.” I found this line to be brilliant and I completely agree.

                Film alone does more justice as far as conveying and evoking emotion. It gives viewers the sense of “living in the moment” and understanding a situation more so than a still image. In the case of Iran and Afghanistan, our society has sadly become numb to images of starving children, death, and poverty. Over and over again we have been educated on the effects of war and terrorism from script and a few photos here and there, but the use of video has been hidden under a burga from the public eye. As Varzia said, the only way around this is to convey the same message in a different way and manipulate certain emotions. The film Kandahar accomplished this task by taking concepts the public is widely numb to and shines them in a different light to make the viewer’s feel something. For example, instead of showing a man stepping on a mine and blowing to pieces, the film shows injured men chasing after heavenly legs floating from the sky. This makes you feel something – I felt pain and sorrow and a need to help the men who were fighting for a leg, as the rest of the world fights over money and frivolous material things. Another example is when Nafas and Khak are hiking on their dry and desolate journey to Kandahar and stop for water; Khak only took one bowl of water and split it with Nafas. This was the only water they had the chance to drink and still they were gracious and only took one bowl.

                This film did a beautiful job at taking the ordinary and making it into something worth watching while brining elements of history to life.