Synopsis

Based on the loya Jirga’s analysis (the Loya Jirga is a typical Afghani political institution), the film explains from the insiders’ point of view why the political situation of the country is meant to be stable.

Related Event

(A)fghanistan: An Impossible State will be followed by a screening of Voice of the Moon.

Full Description

In (A)fghanistan: An Impossible State, Atiq Rahimi offers a first-person post war history of Afghanistan that works less from history as a linear development, than the past as a labyrinth of motive and counter motive. At one stage in the film the narrator explains that various nations were backing various factions and as the viewer tries to keep up with the nefarious intrusions by the Russians, the Iranians, the Pakistanis and the Americans, Rahimi doesn’t so much help us out as admit to his own incomprehension towards the political machinations of other countries. The title suggests not just an impossible nation, but also an impossible condition. As we witness the rubble strewn streets of Kabul and Kandahar, the film wants to try and understand what happens when democracy proves not to be as natural an inclination as we might expect, and as the King, Zahir Shah, hoped it could be. It is Zahir who talks of democracy being a natural instinct, and thus resolves for himself the paradox of a monarch who wants to renounce royal privilege for democratic possibilities.

But with so many people within Afghanistan still thinking feudal thoughts, and so many outside influences demanding a say in Afghan politics, the king’s dreams became Kabul’s rubble, and Rahimi tries to suggest how this came about without relying on cause and effect historicism. This simultaneous attempt to explain and explore finds its form through the first person semi-bemused, semi ironic narration, and also the numerous interviews Rahimi conducts with the king and other key figures in Afghan history over the last thirty to forty years. Rahimi doesn’t expect those interviewed to move him towards a coherent history, but almost demands that they do not: that we see Afghanistan as a nation without a coherent history, as an incoherent patchwork of conflicting motives that leaves the land in a state of devastation.

This, then, is by no means an ‘overview’ of Afghanistan and in fact makes its thesis clear from the very beginning. The opening title credit puts the A in Afghanistan in brackets, and later on we’re informed that ‘fghanistan’ means a land of loss and grieving. Afghanistan would suggest a coherent nation, ‘fghanistan’, on the other hand, a land of constant despair. Rahimi explores that despair with an opening image of an older man and a young boy looking mournfully into space, and immediately follows it with archival footage of fighting. How that devastated feeling, symptomatic on those faces in the film’s opening shot, and the barely pent up anger present in the fighting scenes, can be alleviated is a bigger answer than the director can provide. But he knows how to ask questions that can move towards making sense of a situation that conventional documentary cannot reach.

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