Synopsis

A compelling parable about female suffering and religious extremism under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Featuring a cast of entirely non-professional actors, Siddiq Barmak’s film is about a widow who disguises her 12-year-old daughter as a boy so that at least one family member can earn money. The child however is dispatched to an all-male Taliban training school, where she’s named Osama and where her life depends on keeping her true identity disguised.

Related Event

The official Reel Afghanistan festival launch event will take place in Filmhouse following Osama.

Afghan film-maker Atiq Rahimi will be present for a discussion following the screening.

Scottish Documentary Institute Masterclass - 22 Feb // 2:30pm //Edinburgh College of Art - Atiq Rahimi will present a masterclass on his films and Afghan cinema in the Edinburgh College of Art.

Full Description

Opening on the image of hundreds of burka clad widows claiming they’re hungry and looking for work, the protest is quickly broken up by Taliban troops firing shots into the crowd. At the same time a boy explains to the cameraman filming the event that the person is risking their life.

Siddiq Bamak’s film is a healthily self-conscious but never tricky attempt to understand the Taliban years, and generates a plot out of necessity. One of the widows decides that the only way for herself and her daughter to eat is if her twelve year old daughter masquerades as a boy, and the film follows her attempts at pretending to be male. In some cultures this might be easy; but in the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, Osama initially finds work with a kindly shopkeeper but is then taken off to military school and trained up for war, where her ruse can’t hold.

An unremitting take on Taliban culture, the film has one especially horrific sequence where we witness the cameraman who earlier shot footage of the burka clad protesters being executed, a woman preparing to be stoned to death and Osama married off to a wizened man probably three of four times her age. All the while this is shot against one of the many bombed out buildings. There are plenty bleak films, but few have quite so impressively suggested the multi-faceted sense of tragedy, the horror that lurks round every corner.

Sometimes the horror is registered in no more than holding an image. In one moment early in the film Bamak offers a high-angled shot of various characters - patients on wheeled beds, doctors and visitors scurrying through the rundown hospital corridors - followed by a young boy severely crippled who can’t keep up. Bamak holds the shot long after everybody else has left the frame and we understand this isn’t insensitivity on anybody’s part – just another example of the walking wounded having to fend for themselves.

Clearly influenced by Iranian cinema, and made with the support of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, this manages to keep its story small whilst suggesting the largeness of the themes tackled. In one interview Makhmalbaf’s wife, director Marziyeh Meshkini reckoned that in many ways Afghanistan was a medieval country, and Bamak’s achievement is to show its medieval aspect without suggesting remotely a naivety in the cinematic form. This is sophisticated film making looking back on a decidedly unsophisticated culture, and actually easily surpasses the Iranian attempts to get to grips with Afghanistan: Kandahar, At Five in the Afternoon and Stray Dogs. If Bamak owes a debt to the Iranians; it can’t be a very large one if his own film is superior in form and emotional content to all the others.

Director Profile

Siddiq Barmak (Born September 7, 1962 in Panjshir, Afghanistan) is an Afghanistani film director and producer. He received an M.A degree in cinema direction from Moscow Film Institute (VGIK) in 1987.

He has written a few screenplays and has made a few short films. His first feature film Osama won Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film in 2004.

There is a stylistic echo in Osama of the “Afghan” films by the Iranian Makhmalbaf dynasty - father Mohsen’s Kandahar and daughter Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon, the latter also shot in post-Taliban Kabul. Barmak directed Osama with significant funding and assistance from Mohsen Makhmalbaf; the Iranian director invested thousands of dollars in the film, lent Barmak his Arriflex camera and encouraged him to send the movie to international festivals, which eventually generated further funding from Japanese and Irish producers.[1] Barmak received “UNESCO’s Fellini Silver Medal” for his drama, Osama, in 2003.

Barmak is also director of the Afghan Children Education Movement (ACEM), an association that promotes literacy, culture and the arts, founded by Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The school trains actors and directors for the newly emerging Afghan cinema. Barmak is one of the celebrated figures in Persian cinema as well as emerging cinema of Afghanistan.

Awards

Coming Soon

Buy Tickets for this event from the Filmhouse Cinema