Talibanned

As filmmaking projects go, capturing the plight of women in contemporary Afghanistan under the extremist Taliban regime is about as hard as they come. Yet this was the task Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf ("Gabbeh") set himself for his Cannes competition entry "Kandahar," which won the Ecumenical Jury Prize.

Filming in the territory was out of the question. Nonetheless, Makhmalbaf traveled there disguised as an Afghan refugee to gather material for his movie.

"It is very difficult to go as an Iranian. I had to conceal my identity and grow a long beard and wear traditional clothes," Makhmalbaf recounts. "Of course, there are no pictures allowed, no photography. I went secretly without a camera for a week to a region under Taliban control."

The film was shot in Iran, a mile or two from its border with Afghanistan. "We couldn't cross the line; otherwise we'd have had our heads cut off," the director says plainly. "The village where we shot has 5,000 Afghan refugees living there. It was built by Afghanis just like their own villages. One newspaper wrote that the film's set design is very strong. But the film doesn't have any set design. Everything is real."

"Kandahar" tells the story of an Afghan-born journalist who returns from Canada to save her stranded sister, whose legs were blown off by a mine. The characters in the film are based on real people and events, with only minor changes for the sake of plot.

In a scene that brings home the absurdity of women's invisibility in Afghani society, a doctor must examine female patients through a hole in a curtain that divides his primitive surgery.

Makhmalbaf says he had to scale back certain sequences based on things he had witnessed because they would have been almost unbearable to watch in a movie. "We found a 12-year-old girl, whom we kept helping up and she kept falling down. When we took her to the hospital, they told us she was dying of hunger right there. To have shown that would have been too difficult for people to believe."

Paradoxically, Makhmalbaf hails from a country where women may still be stoned to death. But the director insists that this does not undermine his legitimacy to tackle the subject. "The Eastern world has to express its own pain in its own language. A Westerner would look at it from a touristic point of view," he argues. "They may not be able to see the soul of the problem."