film review: Osama

film review: Osama
Osama is a film in which the making of it is almost as exciting as the film itself. It was made in 2002, and shooting began about five months after the end of the war against the Taliban. Its director, Siddiq Barmak, has a history which is almost the history of Afghanistan in the past twenty years.

Barmak won a scholarship to study film in Moscow, during the Soviet occupation of his country. He returned to Afghanistan in 1987 and made some short films, and from l992 he has led Afghan filmmaking. His films have been about Afghan's political history; about occupation and wars.
When he finished studying in Russia he actually joined one of the Mudjahadeen groups fighting the Russians. He set up for them a centre for documentary and feature films because he said he wanted to create a cultural resource. 'Fighting and weapons do not make our future.'
There weren抰 actually many films made during the years of Taliban rule. Bharmak fled the Taliban and went North in l996 to make documentaries for one of the Northern Alliance Leaders, Ahmed Shah Massoud.

As far as I can discover there wasn't much cinema under the Taliban. But when the Taliban rule ended, Bharmak went straight back to Kabul and worked on a series of short docos; on things such as health and unexploded mines, which were shown around the country in mobile cinemas. Then he began Osama, which interestingly enough is a very beautifully-made and touching film about the oppression of women under the Taliban.

How the hell did he manage to find the resources to make a feature film so soon? Surely that sort of infrastructure had been destroyed? Well this is where the neighbours helped. The executive producer on this film is the internationally respected Iranian director and producer Mohsen Makmalbaf, who found the initial funds and provided most of the technical support. You may remember his extraordinary film Khandahar, which had the rain of crutches and prosthetic legs from the sky. He has also been working with Afghan refugees in Iran and this film couldn抰 have been made without him and his colleagues.

It抯 about a young girl, played by a thirteen-year-old street child called Marina Golbahari, who was actually living on the street when Bharmak found her.Under the Taliban women were not allowed to work. Her character抯 mother is a doctor, or nurse - skilled but forbidden. She is unable to support herself, her daughter and her mother so in desperation she cuts her daughter's hair and dresses her as a boy so she can work in the local bakery with a family friend.
The boy comes to be called Osama and the risk of this is truly terrible, and terrifying. Because those who break the Taliban religious rules are executed.

But the film becomes even more interesting...when the Taliban force young Osama to go to religious school for young boys, to train both in the Koran, and as a fighter.
I抦 not going to tell you if she is discovered because that would spoil the story, but this film has a truly disturbing ending.

The film looks elegant, as some of the best Iranian films can look. Barmak is a mature and experienced filmmaker, the story unfolds beautifully, with great expressiveness. Again, let me give you a couple of images. When the film opens, women in Kabul are demonstrating for the right to work and they are wearing those very hated, but I must say very beautiful, billowing blue bhurkas, these billowing blue images fill the screen.

And again, later, there抯 a scene in which we see into a crude harem one of the mullahs is keeping, of women assigned to him for forced marriage.

What one remembers are the locks: huge, extraordinary, hand-made, idiosyncratic locks. They are formally fascinating like small sculptures but they are also things of horror. Each woman has her very own and she is locked in at night, or chained, if she is disobedient.

The film is not all tough. There are moments of hope, humour, and friendship. It a wonderful film and one of the great scandals of this year Academy Awards was that it was not among the films nominated as Best Foreign Film, when some of the other nominations were mediocre. But we have a chance to see it now.

film review: Osama

90 minutes, Afghanistan/Ireland/Japan (2003), 12A
A girl masquerades as a boy to find work. The first film to be made in post-Taliban Afghanistan Siddiq Barmak's film is not - as its title might suggest - a documentary about the world's most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden, but a politically astute drama following a family of women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Left destitute by years of war and repression and without a single male relative to protect them from the misogynist policies of the local religious leaders, the family of 12-year-old Spandi (Golbarhari) resort to desperate measures to feed themselves.
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Unable to work because they're women, Spandi's mother and grandmother hatch a plan to send their daughter out to work, cutting her hair short and dressing her in trousers so that she looks like a boy. Out on the ravaged streets of Kabul, though, Spandi's act becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as the Taliban round up all available male children for religious classes. Finding friendship in young Espandi (Herati) - the only boy who knows her secret - Spandi takes the name Osama in a desperate attempt to conceal her true identity.

As the first feature film to come out of the region, post 'War on Terror', Barmak's deliberately simple film is a downbeat, thought-provoking piece. While clearly indicting the regime's treatment of women, Barmack takes pains to interrogate the religious and social roots underlying the Taliban's misogyny. In a country that was left destitute after years of war and international neglect, women were turned into the last commodity to be bartered, beaten and sold like cattle. Far from celebrating the American liberation, Osama implicitly suggests that the wounds of contemporary Afghanistan will need more than bombs, bullets or even cinema in order to be healed. It's something that makes the film's opening quotation from Nelson Mandela - "I cannot forget but I can forgive" - seem more than a little optimistic.

Movie type: Drama MPAA rating: PG-13:for mature thematic elements Year of release: 2004 Run time: 82 minutes Directed by: Siddiq Barmak Cast: Arif Herati, Gol Rahman Ghorbandi, Marina Golbahari, Mohamad Haref Harati, Zubaida Sahar
Inspired by a true story, a tale which centers on three generations of women, deeply affected by the advent of the Taliban's rule in their land. Golbahari, a 12-year-old Afghan girl and her mother lose their jobs when this new regime closes the hospital where they work. As the Taliban has already begun to take over Afghanistan, the country's women find themselves forbidden to leave their houses without a 'legal companion'--specifically, a boy or a man. With both her husband and brother dead, there is no one left to support the family--and without being able to leave the house, this mother is left with nowhere to turn. Feeling that she has no other choice, the mother--along with the grandmother--disguises her daughter, Golbahari, as a boy. Now called Osama, the girl embarks on a terrifying and confusing journey as she tries to keep the Taliban from finding out her true identity.

'Osama' a powerful look at living in fear By Ty Burr 02/20/2004

Some films you don't recommend to anyone looking for an easy time of it. Some films you recommend because they show what happened even as you wish you could look away. "Osama," the recent Golden Globe winner that opens today, is the first feature film to be made in post-Taliban Afghanistan, a country that, unlike neighboring Iran, never had much of a movie industry in the first place. It is based on a true story and stars an amateur cast who lived through much of what they're reenacting. The details are specific to Kabul during the five-year rule of the fundamentalist mullahs, but in its larger outlines this could have occurred (or be occurring) in any ideologically driven police state. Parallels to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and the Pol Pot regime -- even the civil rights-era South and "The Handmaid's Tale" -- are there for the taking. At bottom, however, "Osama" works simply as the story of one unlucky young girl.

We never do learn her real name. "Osama" is what the 12-year-old (played with pained clarity by Marina Golbahari) calls herself when she disguises herself as a boy, and the name references Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden only inasmuch as it stands to raise fewer suspicions. In any event, the girl doesn't have other options. Under Taliban rule, women are not allowed outside their houses without a male escort from their family -- the punishment is death by stoning -- but the girl's father and uncle have both been killed in the wars, and the hospital where her mother (Zubaida Sahar) worked has been closed. Cross-dressing is the only way Osama can feed her family.

As directed with poetic bluntness by Siddiq Barmak (who ran the Afghan Film organization before 1996, when the Taliban sent him fleeing to Pakistan; he returned to his homeland after the regime fell in early 2002), the film is anything but a profile in courage. The girl is at all times terrified of discovery, and even with her hair cropped short and her face hardened into an unconvincing glare the audience stays on edge, too. Taliban foot soldiers loom around every corner, their eyes aflame with zeal, their mouths dispensing obscenity-laden warnings to anyone not in lockstep with Allah. Because they see only what they want to see, they never quite see her.

It's a different matter with kids her own age. A wily street urchin named Espandi (Arif Herati) tries to extort a few pennies from Osama, but then becomes her protector when the Taliban start rounding up Afghani youth to provide Al Qaeda with fresh recruits. The girl is sent to a training camp in the mountains, where she has to get through a communal bathing ritual with an old goat of a mullah -- a scene that would be played for ribald comedy in a Hollywood film, it carries a helpless, free-falling danger here.

The movie regularly pulls back to give a wider view of a country prostrated by fanaticism. The opening sequence, in which a protest march led by women in blue burqas is dispersed by soldiers wielding rifles and firehoses, has a you-are-there immediacy, and you sense throughout that Barmak is committing his story to celluloid as quickly as possible, before memories fade. The fear that wracks the features of the young lead actress seems on loan from very recent events, while Ebrahim Gharfui's cinematography locates the threat in every smoky wasteland and quiet alleyway. The only thing he can't find is a place where a child can hide.

Movie review: 'Osama'By Mark CaroChicago Tribune Movie WriterFebruary 18, 2004

Email Print View Share Digg Del.icio.us Facebook Furl Google Reddit Spurl Yahoo Add To Favorites Add to playlist 3 stars (out of 4)

Siddiq Barmak's "Osama," billed as "the first entirely Afghan film shot since the rise and fall of the Taliban," derives most of its power from providing a clear window on a previously obscured world.

Like many films from nearby Iran, "Osama" gives the impression of being artless. It's shot with handheld cameras, uses nonprofessional actors, and feels more like real life accidentally witnessed than drama that has been written and staged.

At the film's center is a 12-year-old girl, played with great naturalness by newcomer Marina Golbahari, but "Osama" isn't about her as an individual so much as what happens to her - and how what happens is indicative of life in Afghanistan under the brutal, repressive Taliban regime.
The girl and her mother (Zubaida Sahar), their heads and bodies shrouded, work at a dilapidated, foreign-run hospital until a Taliban raid causes everyone to flee and the hospital to shut down. Under Taliban law, females cannot work or even venture from their homes without male accompaniment, and now, with the mother's husband and brother having been killed in Afghanistan's armed conflicts, the women are desperate.

So the mother decides to cut her daughter's hair and disguise her as a boy so she can be employed by a sympathetic grocer. The girl is in constant danger of discovery, though a fast-talking beggar boy named Espandi (Arif Herati) helps cover for her by telling people she's a boy named Osama.

You watch the movie with an ongoing feeling of dread, and it's not a feeling that ever dissipates. Barmak is putting faces to names here; we've heard about the Taliban's misogyny and oppressiveness, and now we're experiencing it.

We see Taliban enforcers batter protesters with clubs and water jets, snatch boys to attend training camps, and carry out capital punishment and stoning against foreign journalists and women for seemingly minor offenses. Some of the most horrific moments are the quietest ones, such as a Taliban elder demonstrating to the boys in camp how to perform one's ablutions in a deep water barrel. This image returns at the end in an unshakably haunting way.

In the beginning, Barmak seems to be playing some postmodern tricks as he shoots the action from the point of view of a cameraman whom Espandi is trying to hustle before the Taliban carries out the equivalent of a police riot. You initially wonder whether the cameraman, who gets arrested, is supposed to represent the filmmaker himself, though it becomes clear later on that he's an unrelated documentarian.

"Osama" retains primarily a documentary-like value as well. Aside from the unpredictable, open-hearted Espandi, the movie doesn't venture too deep into its characters.

The people are defined almost entirely by their usually dire situations, enabling you to project yourself more easily into their places. How can you not feel for a mother desperate to feed her family, a girl disguising her gender at the possible risk of death, women in general forced to cover up their beauty and the features that make them recognizably human?

The Taliban does not get ousted by the end of "Osama." Hope is something that must wait until after the credits have rolled.