The Cinema of Afghanistan
A rich cinematic industry once again comes under threat
(Note: as the blog is always a work in progress, I’ve decided an interesting recurring segment about different countries and their cinema industry, history, films, filmmakers, etc. Depending on the country, these posts will either stand alone or be included in Weekly Reels. The first country I’ll cover is Afghanistan, which for obvious reasons deserves its own post. Enjoy and be sure to subscribe and/or share if you feel inclined.)
Sahraa Karimi became the first female chairperson of the Afghan Film Organization (Afghan Film) in 2019 after beating out four other men. The only woman in Afghanistan to receive a PhD in Cinema from the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Karimi was born in Tehran and educated in Slovakia until moving to Afghanistan in 2012 to make more personal films and help other Afghan filmmakers do the same. As she explained:
I thought that it is better to be telling stories from my own country than to be in Europe and make stories that aren’t very close to me.
On August 15, Karimi went to the bank and found about 500 people there. The atmosphere was fearful. The bank teller was telling her they were short on cash when suddenly gunshots began firing. The manager of the bank explained that the Taliban were in the city. He told Karimi to go home quickly, that because of her public profile as the head of Afghan Film it wouldn’t be safe for her, so she was let out the back door and began running the three miles back to home. In her own words:
I was running, and in the middle of my running some people made fun of me, especially the men: “Oh, the director of Afghan film is running! She is afraid of the Taliban! Ha ha ha!” I was surprised. Some girls were just walking. I said to them, “Why are you walking? The Taliban is coming!” And they started running, too.
Once home she began calling contacts from foreign countries that would be able to help her family escape. They quickly make their way to the Kabul airport but fail to make the first flight because of the crowding. Communicating through the Ukrainian government to the Turkish government, they were picked up and taken to a more secure section of the airport and eventually succeeded in leaving, finally arriving in Kyiv by August 17 where she is now trying to get more filmmakers out of the country. (Her escape from Kabul will reportedly now be made into a film.)
But the decision to leave wasn’t easy:
Imagine, Sunday 15th August you start your normal day. As a female, I put on my makeup, my dress and then a few hours later, you make the most difficult decision of your life, to stay or leave. You see in front of your eyes, the collapse of your dreams, the collapse of your country.
From Kyiv, Karimi has been tweeting and speaking out against a potential “genocide of filmmakers and artists…the Taliban have not changed. Ideologically, they live in the Stone Age.” But Karimi is one the more fortunate Afghan filmmakers with the ability to escape through international connections:
There are thousands of promising filmmakers and talents in Afghanistan, who couldn’t make it out and they’re hiding. They’ve deleted their social media accounts. They’re silent. I ask for help, for support, not financial support, intellectual support, something that gives us hope that we don’t feel that we are going to die… we deserve to live in peace, in a calm society and we deserve to fulfil our dreams.
Just days before the Taliban reached Kabul, Karimi warned about the coming disaster for the cinema of Afghanistan in an open letter, which is a distressing cry for help in the face of international silence regarding the situation in Afghanistan and the hypocrisy of people only paying attention to Afghanistan now that the worst has arrived.
At an international panel regarding the present situation on the Afghan film industry at the Venice Film Festival on September 4, Karimi asked everyone to “imagine a country without artists, a country without filmmakers. How can they defend its identity?”
So how did it come to this?
The cinema of Afghanistan has had several stop and go moments in its history. Amanullah Khan, the first sovereign of Afghanistan after securing independence from Britain in 1919, hired a film unit to document an overseas trip in 1927-1928, from which exists the earliest surviving Afghan film footage. This documentary/newsreel filmmaking became institutionalized in 1959 through a film production unit within the Independent Press Directorate, which was by then creating footage for Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last King of Afghanistan. The Directorate, which changed its name twice in the 1960s, with help from the USAID created Afghan Film in 1968 to produce and distribute films. These documentaries and newsreels were either in Dari or Pashto, the two dominant languages spoken in Afghanistan, and played before the mostly Indian feature films, which in that region was/is the film production powerhouse.
Afghan feature filmmaking either began in 1946, 1964, or 1970. In 1946 the 43-minute film, Ishq wa Dusti (“Love and Friendship,” a musical drama), premiered on the first day of the national independence celebrations. Because of the lack of infrastructure/resources, the film was partly shot in Lahore, which was in British India (now Pakistan), with Indian inspired song and dance sequences in Persian. (Two short clips of the film still exist, which were scanned from grainy/decayed prints, but I’m surprised it has survived at all.) The film is about a poet and woman that love each other but the poet agreed to court the woman for his friend, thereby pinning him between love and friendship. Although the film was dismissed derogatorily as Persian by some in the press, the film marked the semi-official beginning of Afghan filmmaking.
Then in 1964, a more robust industry in place under the Ministry of the Press allowed for the first feature film to be shot entirely in Afghanistan through a collaboration with the Fine Arts Institute, whose leader directed the film. Mānand-e ‘Oqāb (“Like an Eagle”) is about a girl that wants to take part in nearby Kabul’s national independence celebrations, so she goes alone to the city for the day and then returns. The press/audiences (who were accustomed to the professional films imported from abroad) didn’t take to the film because of its confusing mixture between newsreel footage and narrative. Nonetheless, like Ishq wa Dusti it continued the trend towards Afghans producing Afghan films in Afghanistan.
And finally in 1970, the first feature film produced by the newly established Afghan Film, Rozgārān (“The Times,” actually three different films put together) was released to national acclaim. Although technically the “third” Afghan narrative film, Rozgārān marked the beginning of an era in which Afghan filmmaking in Kabul became more ubiquitous for the next two and a half decades. As Chihab El Khachab excellently wrote in one of the only articles, if not the only, on the history of cinema in Afghanistan:
Between 1946 and 1970, there were three “firsts” in Afghan cinema, three starts and stops to a fiction filmmaking world that never became an industry comparable to Bombay, Lahore, or Tehran. The technical and financial obstacles were too great, and the kernel of filmmakers and viewers in Kabul too small to develop on a comparable scale to these neighbouring cities. Yet each time a new beginning to Afghan cinema was announced, one could discern the outlines of a nationalist developmental vision in which an emerging film industry signalled the way to modernity.
And also:
While Afghanistan never had a large-scale film industry, state administrators and Kabul’s educated public envisioned the idea of creating an Afghan national cinema on numerous occasions throughout the 20th century. This idea did not begin with Rozgārān in 1970. It had been integral to Kabul-based nationalist developmental discourse emerging since Afghanistan’s independence in 1919. In this context, cinema was one artistic initiative among others designed to create a national culture under central government guidance.
Ten years after Afghan film’s opening, the Saur Revolution in 1978 brought to power the Marxist-Leninist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Because of the party’s alignment with the Soviet Union, Afghan Film received cultural arts funding because of the decades long use of film by the Soviets as a soft power during the Cold War. The aid also allowed young students to study cinema in Moscow and apprentice on film productions in Afghanistan for the first time. But from the Revolution onward, the steady threat of violence hovered over film productions and filmmakers, which politicians would see in propagandistic terms rather than artistic. Because of this and the still limited film infrastructure, the Afghan films of the 1970s and 1980s required auteurs and dedicated professionals who were passionate about filmmaking.
One of the most prolific directors and former head of Afghan Film, “Engineer” Latif Ahmadi, in the 2019 documentary The Forbidden Reel (which nicely summarizes Afghanistan’s film history but conspicuously avoids the nearly two decades of American occupation) recalled:
At first Afghan Film's main purpose wasn't to make fiction films. It was most of all meant to cover official visits of the King and other prominent figures, or events that would happen in society. But after the Communist Revolution, the ideology about that changed completely. The Government provided more funds to make fiction films. Our directors started to produce 6 fictional films per year.
And that:
This period was the Golden Age of Afghan cinema.
The films of this era were novelties and popular among Afghan audiences raised on foreign films. They showcased important themes of culture, romance, national identity, and pro-Soviet, anti-Western socialism. National identity films were especially important because of Afghanistan’s unique non-majority, multiethnic, multilingual society that used the modern art of cinema as a form of unifying the country around an identity. This is a large reason why the US supported the development of Afghan Film and the Soviet support a decade later, and also why Ishq wa Dusti and Mānand-e ‘Oqāb premiered on the first day of their national independence celebrations. As Chihab El Khachab explained:
Any new “beginning” to Afghan cinema, it seems, was integrated into the spectacle surrounding the country’s independence celebrations. Projecting Afghan film “firsts” on these occasions was yet another marker of authenticity and modernity on the nation’s stage, next to the military parades, the folkloric dances, and the sporting events.
And:
The different “beginnings” of Afghan cinema did not acknowledge one another in a strong manner, as though they were starting over again each time. Was it historical amnesia? Or a constant redefinition of what constitutes a “true” Afghan film in different eras? Or a willful effort to create a blank slate for the anticipated rebirth of a new Afghan cinema? Whatever the case may be, the ever-renewed desire to create a national Afghan cinema shows how integral filmmaking has been to Afghanistan’s nation-building ambitions, even when it remained an unfulfilled project.
For instance, Ahmadi’s films from the 1980s reveal an Afghan society divided between class, modernity, urbanity, etc. His 1981 release, Akhtar-e Maskara, “exposes the differences between old and new Kabul at the end of the 1970s and follows the story of a young man who falls into the gap between the two.” Then in 1984, Ahmadi released his historical epic, Hamas-e eshq, which follows a multigenerational feud between families with a Romeo and Juliet sub-story. And finally in 1987, Farar tells the story about a family and couple that are attempting to escape Kabul because of the Saur Revolution. (The film was banned for almost a year because of its depiction of an ineffectual government in Kabul; and in typical Afghan film form, Ahmadi mixes in real footage of the Revolution he had filmed with the narrative.) In each film, from which only short, translated clips are available online, they reveal a divided cultural identity trapped between socio-historical binaries.
After the Soviet invasion began in 1979 and different groups of Mujahideen fighters were constantly in flux around the country, the filmmakers in Kabul and at Afghan Film either stayed in Kabul with uncertainty, fled the country, or joined one of the Mujahideen groups. Then in the mid-90s, civil war broke out between Mujahideen groups after the collapse of the PDPA, which culminated in the Taliban takeover in 1996. For the next five years, film production came to a complete halt. Cinemas were systematically closed, television was forbidden, and film prints were burned because of their negative Western influence.
Through a miraculously heroic maneuver by a few individuals working at Afghan Film, 7,000 films (ranging from newsreel footage from the 1920s to Golden Age feature films) were secured in a room with a disguised door after being tipped off from the Taliban’s Head of Radio and Television, Mullah Mohammad Isaaq Nezami. Nezami remembered:
There was no official order to burn the films, but a group of friends wanted them destroyed. Their ideology had absolute power. They didn't care what anyone thought. I felt sadness. I felt despair that we had fallen so low. I was not supportive of them being burned, whether they were good or bad.
The film prints that the Taliban had found and destroyed were from a separate storage unit that housed Russian, Indian, and American films.
From the transition between Taliban rule to American occupation, Afghan Film was able to operate, Afghanistan was able to attract international film productions and increase the low-budget B-movie market, and cinemas reopened. The first films that were shown again were old Indian and Iranian films using Russian projectors but also Afghan films like Oruj, a 1995 film about the Mujahideen victory over the Soviet Union, which was the final Afghan film produced before the Taliban’s rule.
The biggest difference between pre- and post-Taliban Afghan cinema was in the international attention the country was experiencing after the American invasion. For instance, Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film Kandahar premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival in May but didn’t receive international attention until a few months later with 9/11. Jawed Wassel’s Fire Dancer in 2002 was the first Afghan film nominated for an Oscar and the following year, Siddiq Barmak’s Osama, the first film shot in Afghanistan post-Taliban, won three awards at Cannes and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film.
The bleak situation now facing Afghan Film and Afghan filmmaking in general was recently summarized by Karimi in Venice:
There were 11 short films, fiction, adaptations of our Afghan stories and literature, in production. We were also preparing for the second edition of our national film awards after the first year in 2020. We had just launched the first experimental short film festival and we were trying to have an MoU [memorandum of understanding] with Canadian film academy and other national academies.
Now with the Ministry of Information and Culture, Afghan Film, and the National Archives under Taliban control, the already financially limited project of digitizing and preserving Afghan films and newsreels comes under existential threat once again. And in a culture utilizing the film medium as a form of national identity building, this becomes a problem for more than just cinephiles.
In addition to this is the equally arduous task of historicizing the cinema of Afghanistan, which receives zero attention from Western film writers. In this absence, the West only experiences Afghanistan through Western lenses, which is another form of Said’s orientalism that takes away a certain amount of cultural power (and by no means not in the minority in the world). Besides from a few short clips of the Golden Age films and popular international films like Osama, Afghan films aren’t available online and the ones that are don’t provide subtitles, which greatly limits the scope of exploring/explaining the cinema of Afghanistan. To further explain the significance of this ongoing project, I will once again defer to Chihab El Khachab as he writes about the importance of further excavating the history of Afghan cinema:
Reconstructing the beginnings of Afghan cinema shows the historical depth behind this developmental discourse. This historical attention decentres narratives about modern Afghanistan as a war-torn blank slate, upon which an ongoing “reconstruction” has been superimposed since the 2001 United States-led occupation. Such narratives erase local and national histories, whose interpretation exceeds an American-centric framework. Recovering these histories shows the persistent connection between Afghan cultural production and centralized attempts at building a modern nation-state in Afghanistan over the last century.
(If you liked the article then please share it to spread the word on an underappreciated industry. Make sure to let me know if you have any suggestions on which country I should cover next.)