The prolific Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Gabbeh) had one of his most visible international successes with this haunting, open-ended drama. Set (and shot) during the Taliban era, it follows an Afghani-Canadian woman as she attempts to enter Afghanistan in search of a despondent sister. Since it is illegal for a woman to travel alone, she must rely on the kindness--or curiosity--of strangers, including a scrappy boy and a mysterious American doctor. The woman playing the lead role had earlier contacted Makhmalbaf about a similar real-life search, which prompted him to write the screenplay. The director doesn't really tell her story so much as he unveils a way of life: in the desert, we meet land-mine victims, Red Cross volunteers caught in a Catch-22 world, and women smothered in head-to-foot burkas. The portrait is one of oppression, but also of people furiously trying to get by. --Robert Horton

Customer Rating:
Summary: + 1/2 - Quietly Disturbing
Comment: This film was a quietly disturbing take on one woman's experience while on a determined trek across the stark deserts of Afghanistan to come to the aid of her suffering sister in Kandahar. Nafas shows a melancholy courage in her quest; she is determined to find her sister and must subject herself to the dangers of bandits and checkpoints where women are body searched and otherwise humiliated. Along the way we are shown boys being trained to be mullahs; this scene is very effective in portraying the brainwashing techniques used on boys who must learn and recite prayers as well as hold up a Russian machine gun and explain it's purpose. When one boy is expelled for improper recital, he must do what he can to make money, thus he agrees to escort Nafas to Kandahar after she is abandoned by her first escorts. He is aggressive and desperate; the boy who played this part was one of the better actors in the movie. And so it goes on - Nafas is passed from escort to escort due to the dangers and suspicions of others.
The actress portraying Nafas is beautiful; she need not have said a word to convey the pain and sorrow of her plight, because her eyes are so expressive. Her speaking parts in English sounded a bit stiff and I missed some of what she said because her voice was so low.
All said, this is a haunting film which I've added to my repertoire of books and movies about Afghanistan. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to further his/her exploration of the devastating results of Taliban rule.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: KANDAHAR
Comment: This is more of a docudrama than a film with a plot and satisfying ending along with character development. Roger Ebert says it well: "KANDAHAR does not provide deeply drawn characters, memorable dialogue or an exciting climax. Its traffic is in images..." It is the images that stick. This was made before 9/11 to show the persecution of women in Afghanistan. It is partially based on a true story involving Nelofer Pazira (Nafas), an Afghan-born Canadian journalist. In the film she has received a letter from her sister who was left behind when the family evacuated Russian-controlled Afghanistan. Her sister, now living under the rule of the Taliban, no longer wants to go on living and has given a date, the lunar eclipse, when she will commit suicide. The letter was delayed in getting to Nafas and she has arrived at the Iranian-Afghan border with only three days until the eclipse. As a woman, she is not free to travel alone into Afghanistan. She must arrange for some male assistance. The rest of the film is about her journey to find her sister. Along the way she meets a Black American disguised as an Afghan medical doctor, a Red Cross camp helping land mine victims who have lost legs. The image of the doctor (he doesn't know she is from Canada initially) asking questions of Nafas thru a third party and being separated by a sheet with a hole to examine her ears, eyes and mouth would be humorous, if not true. A Red Cross helicopter makes a 'leg drop', parachuting artificial legs to the camp below and we are overwhelmed by the image of several dozen amputees with crutches literally racing each other to get a pair of legs. The image of a her young male guide (10-12 years old) pulling a ring off a skeleton in the desert and trying to sell it to her is wrenching. Once again, we are struck by the incredible cruelty that the human race is capable of inflicting on one another, simply because of race or gender. You will probably not remember the plot but you will remember the images, images the reinforce the knowledge that there is both good and evil in this world and we must counter evil wherever we find it. A sobering film.
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Customer Rating:
Summary: ill-conceived and overhyped
Comment: Kandahar is a film that I've been wanting to see for years. It became a "de rigueur" staple of the art-house cinema circuit following 9/11. I remember the long lines at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Houston, when the film was screened.

Obviously, this film has its fans, as evidenced by the glowing reviews on Amazon. I personally found it to be a sham. For starters, it is filmed documentary-style, but the plot is heavily scripted. I'm not saying this concept is flawed; it works in The Story of the Weeping Camel. But, in a film that deals with such serious topics as famine and land mines, it feels wholly out of place. Also, the English-language dialogue suffers from flat delivery. The protagonist seems phony; every potentially poignant moment is ruined by her deadpan method of speaking.

Visually, the film is stunning at times, especially when you see the wedding party march in the desert. The sea of burqas in contrasting colors (such as emerald, black, ochre yellow, peach, white, purple, etc.) is absolutely stunning. But the quality of the cinematography is not enough to rescue the flawed direction.

I imagine that the throngs of curious people who clamored to see the film left the cinema somewhat disappointed. I know I did, watching it on DVD.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Looking Behind the Veil
Comment: KANDAHAR, or THE SUN BEHIND THE MOON, is an interesting and provocative film. Though I felt that in some ways the movie was manipulative since it was narrated in English and not actually filmed in Afghanistan, I did learn much from it. However, it felt as though it was an "outsider's" view into the world of Afghan people told from the vantage point of someone who had escaped the Taliban's stronghold and resides in Canada now. Also, the director is from Iran. So, this, too, somehow takes away from the film's "true" perspective. To the film's credit, however, it delivers powerful images and a look at how sad and utterly devastated the landscape of a once-proud nation has become. It makes the more fortunate among us perhaps stop for a moment to treasure the small freedoms we take entirely for granted and realize that the people of Afghanistan deserve a chance for freedom too. It also leaves one with haunting questions: Will the Afghan people ever write love stories, romances, poems, songs after it seems that their world was entirely capsized and their hearts broken by the Taliban? Will women ever be able to live in anything but total fear there? What is going to happen to that country when the war is over and all the world's focus shifts away from them? For all its failures, the film does deliver us a postcard from a land most of us will never otherwise know and makes us feel the desire to understand and empathize with its people. Post-9/11, that is important and essential to the world's healing.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: An Alright Drama
Comment: It was interesting and beautiful. The acting looked like acting...this is not the documentary it looks like. If some of the performances had not occasionally distracted me into rembering I was watching a movie, I'd have given it 5 stars.

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