It isn't everyone who can claim to have inspired Mohsen Makhmalbaf with a script idea - and then be asked to portray herself in his extraordinary new film about the lives of Afghan refugees on the Iran-Afghanistan border. "Kandahar" premiered at Cannes this spring. Niloufar Pazira tells Rahat Kurd about becoming the production crew's impromptu translator and payroll clerk, bonding with Pashtun women on location - and the unexpected challenge of getting ready for her close-up, chador and all.
"What is the worst thing that happens to someone who knows they're a refugee?"

British journalist Robert Fisk put the question to Niloufar Pazira after taking her to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon last year. Pazira, a journalism graduate of Carleton University, was raised in Kabul and fled Afghanistan in 1989 - on foot, over a ten-day journey-- with her parents and siblings. Having been a refugee for one year in Pakistan before moving to Canada, she was able to answer him promptly. "The worst thing, because the world looks down at you, and makes you feel that you have no ability and no control over your life, is that you actually believe that."

Not that Pazira ever believed it of herself. It was she who met the celebrated director Mohsen Makhmalbaf during a trip to Iran, and told him about her plan to return to Afghanistan. Pazira wanted to find and help a childhood friend in Kabul who was languishing with despair under the Taliban regime, and wanted someone to document the journey.

Makhmalbaf refused - "He told me the only way he makes a film is when his own emotions direct him to the heart of the subject, not someone's request or offer" - but after reading extensively about Afghanistan and traveling there himself, he wrote a screenplay.

In the meantime, Pazira says, "We kept in touch. I think it was a year later that he phoned me in Ottawa to tell me he wanted me to come to Tehran."

Makhmalbaf sent Pazira a script: it was about an Afghan woman living in Canada who is trying to return to Kandahar to rescue a younger sister who, ten years before, had been badly injured in a landmine explosion, and could not leave the country. The fictional younger sister was to remain an off-screen presence; the role of the older sister on a rescue mission was written for Pazira. Could she possibly put her Master's thesis at Concordia on hold for a few months?

Pazira was blunt: "I left immediately."

"Kandahar" was filmed during the past winter, most of it at a refugee camp in the desert near the Iran-Afghan border. While Pazira's attempt to return to Afghanistan provides a thread of narrative continuity, she insists that her role in the film becomes secondary to those of the characters she meets along the way. As a single woman, she cannot travel into the Taliban ruled country without a chaperone or guide.

While trying against mounting difficulties to get to Kandahar, she encounters memorable people in extraordinary situations: a vocally gifted young boy scorned by the Taliban; an African-American doctor in search of God; a man whose marriage has been struck by tragedy, yet has not lost its romance.

Two of the production stills provide startling glimpses of life for these refugees: one depicts Afghan men who have each lost one or both legs in landmine explosions, running - on crutches - across the desert. Their faces are turned skyward, laughing and eager. The second photo shows a vast cloudy sky, empty except for a pair of prosthetic legs floating on a small parachute down to earth.

Pazira described at length how difficult it had been to convince members of the different Afghan tribes in the camp, the Hazaras and the Pashtuns, of the value of participating in a film.

"Most of [them] had no idea about Iranian cinema and its role in the international arena. A lot of people we were working with had not even seen a film."

She emphatically credits Makhmalbaf for going to great lengths - wearing traditional Afghan clothes, meeting with tribal leaders to explain his project, and renting a small room where people could actually come and watch films on video - to make it clear to all inhabitants of the community that it was they who were helping him, and not the other way around.

In keeping with that principle, there was to be no false sense of passively received charity.

"The director would say, 'I'm not trying to help you resolve all of your problems - you have that ability. I'm just giving you a chance to see it for yourself.'"

"I remember him constantly quoting from the Qur'an, 'The condition of a people cannot change unless they change what is in their hearts.' I happen to like that verse very much myself," she added. As a journalist inspired by the people whose struggles she has documented, Pazira found Makhmalbaf a great teacher of how to diffuse directorial power.

"The director got involved with characters personally - not just saying, 'Here is your line, I want you to memorize it,' but instead he would say, 'Okay, so when you were going back to Afghanistan and they robbed you, how did it happen? What did you do?' And the person would say, 'We couldn't do anything, our hands were empty. We could only throw stones at them as they left.' And Makhmalbaf would say, 'Just show me how you did that.' By creating a connection between their role in the film and the real experience that they've gone through, I think he cut his work into half."

Despite these careful measures it was never entirely possible to avoid potential controversy - yet Pazira doesn't see this as necessarily a bad thing. "The presence of the film crew created a lot of curiosity among the women and they would peek at us from behind their doors to see what was going on. And I felt that for any young girl who lived there it almost meant a revolution - to have seen us starting a little cinema there," she said. "I think that was a positive thing, to have these young people become very interested in the movies that were being shown. It created a completely different dynamic within the community."

Still, the prospect of its adult female members acting before the camera was viewed with considerable discomfort - and one of the tribal groups refused to participate altogether. Nevertheless, women and children who did participate were paid as much - or more, confides Pazira - as the men. If a woman's husband came to ask for her pay on her behalf, Mr. Makhmalbaf would turn the money over to Pazira so she could pay the women directly - again, challenging certain male privileges, but within the rules of etiquette. Where might these gestures lead?

Pazira is cautiously optimistic. "I think there was a realization that they have an ability to do something as women, whereas in the past they were always told, "You're just there until you get married and another man comes to look after you. So, maybe certain things were brought under question that they wouldn't otherwise have questioned."

Pazira's mere presence was certainly cause for many questions in the midst of people who could claim her as their own, yet whose lives have been totally circumscribed by a fate she escaped when she was in her teens.

Out of everyone on the Farsi-speaking film crew, Pazira alone speaks Pushtu, and was able to make connections with women who would otherwise have had no access to the intriguing events going on in their midst.

"When I would go and say hello they would look at me, like, who is this alien? And when they would ask me, "Pashtuna?" and I would say, yes, I am (an Afghan who speaks Pushtu) - they just opened their arms, they were so welcoming. All the young girls came to see me and wanted to talk," she recalled with pleasure. As Makhmalbaf put it, "Any Afghan woman locked up in her house could be Niloufar. There is no difference."

The experience has inspired Pazira in terms of her own future goals; her apprenticeship under one of the world's most respected filmmakers, after all, was a priceless education that she is itching to put to use. "There were several themes we didn't have time to explore in the film that I want to go back and make a film about," she said. "I think if we were to go back and make another film, their attitude would be very different."

Indeed, the notion that people living in the aftermath of war and poverty can be engaged in creative forms of expression, and can attach moral and spiritual value to such work, is the major breakthrough that "Kandahar" represents - both the story the film tells, and the process by which the film was made. It is a breakthrough that will have, and deserves, an international audience. |