Osama
Cast
Osama: Marina Golbahari
Espandi: Arif Herati
Mother: Zubaida Sahar
Mullah: Khwaja Nader
Grandmother: Hamida Refah
Programme
Notes
A selection of critics' comments, which set this film in its context but reveal very little of its story:
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
[Read
Review Here]
Siddiq Barmak's harrowing movie about Afghanistan under the Taliban is prefaced
with a quotation from Nelson Mandela: "I can't forget, but I will forgive."
Barmak makes it very difficult for us to do either. The spare beauty of the
ruined Kabul cityscape and the moments of surreal and dreamlike spectacle are
very similar to movies like Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar and Samira Makhmalbaf's
Blackboards; in fact, the Makhmalbaf production company has invested in the
movie. Their influence is palpable, but the note of overt and unambiguous anger
is something new.
Barmak's direction is fluid, kinetic and exciting as he follows the desperate
fortunes of a young girl dressed by her mother as a boy called Osama, so that
she can go out to work; having lost a husband and brother in the ongoing warfare,
the mother needs someone to earn a crust. But the Taliban's theocratic police
force "him" to join a school where Osama's secret identity is under
threat. The Taliban are loathsome tyrants, and prurient and hypocritical to
boot.
Osama reminded me a little of Tarèque Masud's wonderful movie The Clay
Bird, about a young boy sent to a madrassah school, but without that film's
redemptive aspect. Osama should probably be viewed alongside Samira Makhmalbaf's
forthcoming At Five in the Afternoon, which also engages, in a more complex
and unresolved way, with Islam and the status of women. Osama is challenging,
full-throttle cinema, uncompromisingly engaged with the contemporary world.
Philip French, The Observer
[Read
Review Here]
There is a long tradition in Western drama of women cross-dressing to make their
way in a patriarchal society. It stretches from Viola, Rosalind and Portia in
Shakespeare to Barbra Streisand in Yentl. This device is used in rather more
dangerous circumstances by writer-director Siddiq Barmak in Osama, the first
feature movie to be made in his native Afghanistan since its recent liberation.
This well-made, understated film is set at the time when the Taliban were establishing
their vindictive rule, forcing women to give up gainful employment and preventing
them from leaving home without a male relative as chaperone. It's a frightening
story, the non-professional cast are wholly convincing, and things do not go
well for the little heroine. However we emerge thanking God, Allah and yes,
even Blair and Bush that this regime has been toppled.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
[Read
Review Here]
The movies are a little more than a century old. Imagine if we could see films
from previous centuries -- records of slavery, the Great Fire of London, the
Black Plague. "Osama" is like a film from some long-ago age. Although
it takes place in Afghanistan, it documents practices so cruel that it is hard
to believe such ideas have currency in the modern world. What it shows is that,
under the iron hand of the Taliban, the excuse of "respect" for women
was used to condemn them to a lifetime of inhuman physical and psychic torture.
No society that loves and respects women could treat them in this way.
The movie touches some of the same notes as "Baran" (2001), an Iranian
movie about an unspoken love affair between a young Iranian worker and an Afghan
immigrant who is a girl disguised as a boy. The film is not as tragic as "Osama,"
in part because Iran is a country where enlightened and humanistic attitudes
are fighting it out side by side with the old, hard ways. But in both cases
Western audiences realize that to be a woman in such a society is to risk becoming
a form of slave.
What is remarkable is the bravery with which filmmakers are telling this story
in film after film. Consider Tahmineh Milani's "Two Women" (1999),
which briefly landed her in jail under threat of death. Or Jafar Panahi's harrowing
"The Circle" (2000), showing women without men trying to survive in
present-day Tehran, where they cannot legally work, or pause anywhere, or be
anywhere except inside and out of sight. The real weapons of mass destruction
are ... men.
Who will go to see "Osama?" I don't know. There is after all that new Adam Sandler movie, and it's a charmer. And "The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra" is opening, for fans of campy trash. I'm not putting them down. People work hard for their money, and if they want to be entertained, that's their right. But brave dissenting Islamic filmmakers are risking their lives to tell the story of the persecution of women, and it is a story worth knowing, and mourning. In this country Janet Jackson bares a breast and causes a silly scandal. The Taliban would have stoned her to death. If you put these things into context, the Jackson case begins to look like an affirmation of Western civilization.
David Walsh, World Socialist Website
[Read
Review Here[
Several films at the recent Toronto film festival treated, directly or indirectly,
the ongoing tragedy in Afghanistan, Osama (directed by Afghan filmmaker Siddiq
Barmak), At Five in the Afternoon (directed by Samira Makhmalbaf, from Iran)
and Silence Between Two Thoughts (directed by Babak Payami, also Iranian). The
first two were shot in Afghanistan, the third a few miles from its border in
eastern Iran.
The films deal with politically and ideologically explosive issues. The Iranian
government-whose attacks on artistic freedom and filmmakers in particular have
escalated over the past several years-attempted to prevent Payami from completing
his film, arresting him temporarily and confiscating the film's negative. He
was obliged to recreate a video version of Silence Between Two Thoughts from
computer files
The three films take different approaches to Afghan reality. Osama follows the
experiences of a young girl-loosely based on a true story-during the rule of
the Taliban; Samira Makhmalbaf's work is set in post-Taliban Afghanistan; and
Silence Between Two Thoughts makes no direct reference to either locale or time
period.
The three works have this much in common: they paint existence for the masses
of people in Afghanistan in hellish colours. The directors forthrightly present
the unspeakable poverty and economic backwardness that afflict the Central Asian
country, the products of decades of civil war, imperialist intrigue and dictatorial
rule by various reactionary cliques.
Each of the works is honest, intelligent and humane. The filmmakers have attempted
to shed light on a horrifying situation for an international audience. They
deserve full credit for having done so. The degree to which they have been successful
demonstrates powerfully that art has no limits as to its subject matter. It
is fully capable of taking on and communicating the most painful modern human
realities.
Barmak's Osama is the first feature production of the post-Taliban Afghan cinema.
The film is a succession of virtually unrelieved horrors and humiliations, each
of them individually quite convincing. Barmak represents the Taliban movement
as merciless and primitive, the sworn enemy of everything modern and urban-an
Islamic version of the Pol Pot regime. The cleric/judge and the lecherous mullah
are something more, cynical in the one case, hypocritical in the other