Kandahar Details

Like Pulling Teeth

The title of this film is interesting and the plot is simple. An Afghan woman returns to Afghanistan to save her sister who was accidentally left behind when the family fled.

Unfortunately, the film does not live up to the billing. While I accept that this film cannot be judged against others in any meaningful way; the acting, if you can call it that, is fairly hopeless. The scenery, which if shot properly, could have looking stunning is merely drab. The plot keeps referring to two things: the forced wearing of the burqha and, bizarrely, false legs.

Occasionally, this film becomes more of a documentary, which would be fine if anything of more substance was shown. Ultimately, it left me cold; I didn’t feel moved by the Afghans people living conditions. Perhaps this was what the director intended? Just to feel, well, hopeless. But how a reviewer could give it 5-stars is just not possible. I’ll give it an extra star, but it really only deserves two.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Both excellent and relevant

A Canadian woman who fled Afghanistan as a child returns to her country of birth prevent her sister's suicide. Pretty much a road movie from start to finish, this westernised muslim woman experiences first hand the way the Taliban regime governs as she makes her way to Kandahar. Part fact but mainly fiction, the film never strays too far from central issue of the treatment of women under the Taliban, however neither does it ignore that regimes failings. I really could not turn myself away from a picture of a country that truly is miles away from my own and although that picutre it paints is bleak, saddening and depressing at times, it also demonstrates an awareness of modernity with Islam and where any change within such a culture will come from. Also on the disc was a short documentary called Afghan Alphabet which looked at education on the border of Iran/Afghanistan and how it is slowly helping to reduce the influence that fundamentalism has on children, specifically women.