Synopsis

Dastaguir sits on the side of the road, his young grandson, Yassin, at his side. A desolate Afghan landscape stretches out all around him- a half-demolished bridge, a dry riverbed below and a dusty road that reaches its vanishing point on the horizon. That road leads to a far-off coal mine, Dastaguir’s dreaded destination. He is on a painful journey to see his son, the child’s father, who works in the mine. He must tell him that their village has been bombed and his entire family killed.

The old man is torn between his own remorse, his unbearable solitude and codes of honour deeply engrained in the Afghan soul. As he struggles with so many conflicting emotions, Dastaguir encounters several strangers along the way. There’s the sentry house guard, the philosophical roadside merchant, the mysterious veiled woman who waits endlessly, and other victims of this nameless war that goes on somewhere off-screen.

Related Event

Director Atiq Rahimi will be present for a discussion following the film.

Full Description

There are problems in film that often resemble the problems of life. How for example do we tell someone that a loved one has died? In cinema, like in life, it is often a quick gesture of euphemism and empathy: there has been an accident, the person’s told, followed by a look of concern and the crushing reality: they’re dead. Earth and Ashes plays like a considered, extended attempt to understand the depth of feeling in what is so often a momentary gesture. The whole film is basically about a grandfather and his grandson going to tell the boy’s father that the rest of the family has recently been killed in the war. Working in a style offered by many Iranian film-makers but mastered by Abbas Kiarostami, Atiq Rahimi’s film shares with Kiarostami’s The Passenger, Where is My Friend’s House and And Life Goes On…the sense of a journey that conveys meaning less through familiar human interaction, than through a relationship that includes chance encounters and a communion with the passing landscape.

The film also contains plenty ironies and ambiguities: as the pair travel through a devastated landscape to tell the father, how much closer to recovering from the loss through the journey are they, than the father who still must work many hours a day in the mines to make a living? The journey somehow offers them at least a ritual for grieving. And when they arrive, is the father not surprised to see them after already being offered some bad news, worse than the news they have to report? What is so great about Rahimi’s film is that it deals with major issues without ever becoming an issue film, without ever reducing the aesthetic principle of off-screen space, long takes and lengthy silences to the potential adrenaline rush of the subject to hand, and the therapeutic expectations of people recovering from loss.

This is presumably partly because of Rahimi’s aesthetic training in Europe, but probably owes just as much to an emotional pragmatism that doesn’t allow for the extended grieving we often see in middle-class films from the West. Just as we said that the problems in film often resemble the problems in life, so we can repeat it here in the specific context of a poverty-stricken, war-devastated nation that has no time, money, or sense of exclusiveness in their grief to fret therapeutically about the neurosis of loss. Rahimi’s achievement is that he manages to give absolute dignity and singularity to lost lives without ever allowing his film to topple over into the maudlin and the tearful. It’s a major achievement from a burgeoning national cinema.

Awards

Earth & ashes, by Atiq Rahimi, has been awarded with the Netpac Jury Award at the 9th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. The Jury mentioned the film was a “Unique and poetic road-movie detailing tragic reality of Afghanistan war”.

• Cannes 2004 - Official Selection - Un Certain Regard

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