Synopsis

What happens when a group of hairdressers from America travel to Kabul with the intention of telling Afghan women how to do hair? This unique development project, funded in part by beauty-industry mainstays (Vogue, Clairol, M.A.C.), sets out to teach the latest cutting, coloring, and perming techniques to practicing and aspiring hairdressers and beauticians in an intense three-month curriculum. The teachers are all volunteers - three from the US and three Afghan-Americans returning home for the first time in over twenty years.

The Beauty Academy of Kabul documents the poignant and often humorous process through which women with very different experiences of life come to learn about one another, offering a rare and intimate look into the lives of women in Afghanistan.

Related Event

The Beauty Academy of Kabul will be followed by a screening of AINA.

Director Liz Mermin will be present for a discussion following the screening.

Full Description

This sweet film could easily have lent itself to caricature: half a dozen hairdressers take off for Kabul determined to heal the souls of war-weary, oppressed Afghan women. With missionary zeal the hairdressers are determined to give the women back their right to look beautiful. What the hairdressers decide to do is create a beauty academy to train the locals up in beauty treatments and hair-care, and the film treads a fine line between taking the hair missionaries seriously, and wondering just how important in the wider scheme of things having good hair really is. But we should keep in mind Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum, “only superficial people don’t judge by appearances” .The very fact the Taliban punished any women attempting to register their beauty, or even show an inch of flesh, helps us take the hairdresser’s liberatory beliefs seriously. In the second half of the film a brassy and bold red-headed New Yorker comes to help out, and insists that there are ‘settlers and pioneers. I am a pioneer.” That she is only talking about getting into a car and driving in a country where women leave these masculine duties to the men, might suggest we should laugh at her rather than with her. But she’s got a point and also a sense of humour – any comment she makes is usually offered with a prompt burst of laughter following it.

At other stages the bluntness comes from the Afghan women. In one moment they ask a British hairdresser how old she is and why she isn’t married. She replies that she’s not answering the first question and answers the second rather half-heartedly. It is one of the few glimpses we have of not just the trouble-strewn lives of the Afghan women, but also the troubles perhaps of the western women helping them out. At another moment the British hairdresser shows us a hair model and compares her frizzy, reddish locks to the straight dark hair on the model and says that is the hair her mother wishes she had. Liz Mermin’s film has a healthy sense not just of irony but also of sub-text: what does motivate these women to come to Afghanistan and suffer intolerably hot conditions one describes as ‘hell’? And yet in one scene our breezy American says “maybe I’m out of my mind but there are some places you come to and feel at home. This is one of them.”

Yet of course not all the hairdressers coming from abroad are from abroad. Three of the six fled Afghanistan over twenty years ago. One, who’d been away for twenty three, says she can hardly believe how much has changed – when she looks at the bombed out buildings she wonders if they are real. But the guilt she feels is vivid enough, and she realises that the difficulty of flight is nothing next to the stoicism of staying put.

At the beginning of the film one woman having her hair done insists that men and woman should be equal; but in almost the same breath adds that her fiancé doesn’t know she’s having her hair done. At another moment, when one of the hairdressers gets the local women to exercise, she suggests it seems more like they’re dancing than exercising. ‘That’s Afghanistan’ we hear. Mermin’s film isn’t only about the narcissism of beauty; it is also about putting a broader sense of beauty back into the Afghan soul.

Buy Tickets for this event from the Filmhouse Cinema