This weekend I had the pleasure of watching “Kandahar” (2001), a beautifully shot film starring Nelofer Pazira, as Nafas, based on her true life story of returning to Afghanistan to find her sister 10 years later, after she had fled to the United States in 1989 during the Soviet Union’s occupation and the mujahideen’s rebel take over.
The film opens with a view from a hand held camera in a helicopter following the rich, red, jagged mountain tops of Afghanistan, and the camera’s movement mimics the jaggedness of these peaks. The motion is not shaky as much as it lends itself to simulating the experience of walking along the mountains from a bird’s eye view.
Immediately thereafter, the camera’s gaze (positioned from the helicopter, and then from the ground) smoothly and slowly tilts down – following white parachutes – falling from the sky against a light blue sky as women’s voices fill the landscape with a song. The opening is simple and poetic, the significance of the parachutes is not clear, but the transition from mountains to windy dessert is intriguing with the simple equipment the director chooses.
The camera, again hand held, walks through crowds of little school girls, visually establishing the residents of rural Kabul, walking through the crowd shooting straight on, with close ups of each child’s face. The shear volume of people is overwhelming, perhaps touching on a westerner's point of view of Afghanistan as a world a part, a group of unknown peoples. The view swiftly cuts to a walking pan of close up shots of their faces, so gorgeous and unique, making for an intimate feeling and revelation of each child’s individuality. The removed feeling, the irresponsibility that many post 9/11 westerns may have, is effectively replaced by this visual technique.
In contrast, we are introduced to the young boys of Afghanistan - a walking pan across the back of their heads – mimicking the pan of the young girls’ school lines from the previous scene, yet the young men are all in white hats chanting scripture, and we do not get to initially know them by their faces, rather a distant and anonymous symbol of scholarship and a future military arm.
When we do see a young man’s face, the teacher has shouted “silence” - the chanting is broken and we cut to a medium shot of a boy’s head obediently raising up to recite the attributes of a Kalashnikov or “semi automatic weapon, with gunpowder and repeat. It kills the living and destroys those already dead.”
The visual hints, and absence of narration speak volumes to generations raised in war and spiritual devotion. The clever compound of visuals of empty landscapes and children's roles, speak clearly of isolation and the roots of a misunderstood culture with dignity and urgency for peace.
In this simply shot part-memoir, part-drama, there are two other effective camera choices that lend to the visual story.
A wide depth of field captures in the foreground burkha covered, prayer wailing women around a pile of rocks that appears to be a grave, while simultaneously along the horizon, men are fiercely digging the earth to bury another community member lost. The women’s rocking parallels the men’s raising of their shovels, as separated by gender but connected by death.
As Nalas travels toward Kandahar, she visits a camp of men with blown off limbs from the surrounding land mines (a common problem). A great wind is felt, the men begin running with their crutches and the image of the white parachutes return, whose significance is revealed as the viewers and men draw closer realizing that the white parachutes are artificial legs courteously of the Red Cross. The closure of the film's opening scenes turned what was once beautiful and mysterious into a harsh reality and works really well in surprising the audience with emotion.
The final visual choice is a meditative tie of the people and the land, by a perfectly divided into thirds, wide shot that zooms in, maintaining the thirds ratio as Nalas' traveling group walks along the desert’s horizon.
I enjoyed “Kandahar” as a powerful visual invitation to explore other countries’ communities and sympathize with them as fellow humans undoubtedly deserving a life of understanding and peace.
