|
|
|
|
|
|
An Interview with Samira Makhmalbaf for the movie "5 in the afternoon" in the Cannes film festival 2003
Q: After making Blackboard in Kurdistan what drew you to Afghanistan for doing 5 in the Afternoon?
Samira: Living in today’s world if a building collapses on the American continent, in less than two years two countries in Asia collapse for the same reason. I ask myself that if everything is so interrelated, how can the subjects of my films only relate to the place in which I was only born? Today, one’s homeland is the place for which one’s heart beats. In the past two years all of the planet earth’s mass media have talked about my country’s neighbors. So as an Iranian situated between the two tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq, how could I have remained only a listener and an observer?
Q: When your father made Kandahar, the incident of 9/11 had not yet occurred and no one spoke of the Afghan tragedy. Yet in the past two years we have been introduced to Afghanistan and revisited Iraq through the media. Don’t you think Afghanistan is somewhat repetitious for a worldwide audience?
Samira: When my father made Kandahar, before 9/11 people would ask why he focused his attention on a forgotten and insignificant country. 9/11 proved that cinema can at times preempt television and satellite dishes in transmitting information.
Of course, there’s a difference between my father’s Kandahar and 5 in the Afternoon. Kandahar was an attempt to inform the world of a forgotten country. 5 in the Afternoon tries to correct the same world’s misleading information generated by the political hustle and bustle of the mass media.
Basically, radio, TV and satellites are the official voice of regimes and powerful authorities but cinema is the only broadcast medium where the author voices the spirit of nations without any tribune. We understand the spirit of India from Satiya Jit Ray’s films not from musical video clips on satellite TV. Ken Loach presents the spirit of the British people while BBC or Tony Blair can only be the spokespersons of England’s official policies.
Through Jim Jarmush’s work I can understand a stranger’s pleasure upon stepping out in Harlem but not from CNN reports about it. The role of mass media such as TV and satellite are primarily for the expansion of worldwide ignorance. It is as if they don’t report to inform us of something.
Sometimes they emphasize the news of one place so the people of the world pay no attention to important news elsewhere. Their information transmission resembles a wave. First a 100% of news is on Afghanistan or Iraq for example. Then they lower it and bring it to zero percent and when that happens we are supposed to accept that there’s no problem in that region.
In addition to this tidal mode of transmission, the information is superficial. Some years ago the Americans made a movie called Rambo in Afghanistan. Rambo came and rescued Afghanistan. The pictures that the world media and especially the American media broadcast on Afghanistan and Iraq were nothing except those of the liberation of these countries by the same Rambo. When an Iraqi filmmaker presents a work on what went on in Iraq in the past three decades, then I will be able to understand what kind of a place Iraq has been and what it means to live as an Iraqi. That person will be the representative of the spirit of the Iraqis, who at present are without a spokesperson.
The mass media always bombards perpetually thirsty world opinion with one view, and cliché pictures and since news makes analysis, gradually, all start to think like Bush. If there are different news and analysis on Iraq versus Afghanistan that previously had one line of analysis, it is because of the disputes between Western countries over their interests in the Third World. I still remember from childhood how French-made military airplanes that were sold to Saddam destroyed the house of my grandmother’s neighbor and killed my playmates.
The amount of news transmitted to the global audience by the mass media equals that of the limits of the propaganda of a politician’s reelection campaign. Actually, after all that media tumult I went to Afghanistan to understand more deeply the situation of the people in this region of the East through the medium of cinema.
Q: How well do you know Afghanistan?
Samira: My preliminary knowledge of Afghanistan goes back to my childhood to when I was eight years old and acted in the film Cyclist. I got to know the Afghan immigrants in Iran on the set. In the same context I traveled to Pakistan and the border of Afghanistan for that film. That experience is now a vague one for me but it did create some sympathy in me for the Afghans.
The second phase of my knowledge goes back prior to 9/11 when I spent a month along the border of Iran and Afghanistan photographing Afghan women. There I realized the heavy shadow of men and the dominant male culture, poverty and homelessness of the Afghans. My work was not restricted to taking pictures.
With my father (who was filming Kandahar) we hid women and children dying of hunger in our vans and minibuses from the border officers and took them to hospital for treatment. Some survived sure death. At that point I felt that my celebrity and reputation gave me a responsibility concerning the demise of these women and children.
The third phase is post 9/11. The media bombarded me too. I couldn’t tolerate remaining still so I traveled inside Afghanistan. The result was a short film that became a part of the 11 episode series and is titled God, Construction, and Destruction.
Then I went to Afghanistan three more times. On one of those occasions I stayed the summer through the fall of 2002. I also ran into problems. The most important of which was the unsuccessful kidnapping attempt on my younger sister Hanna.
Q: How was Afghanistan in those days?
Samira: My feeling in the summer and fall of 2002 was that the women of Afghanistan had been more liberated by the new situation. This was a year after the fall of the Taliban. They were able to come out of their homes for work and school. Yet they were still afraid of the return of Taliban. Their fear is quite obvious in the documentary Joy of Madness directed by my 14-year-old sister.
Then, just like now, Afghanistan had many economic and cultural problems. Some believed that Americans didn’t do anything but change the Taliban regime that they had brought to power themselves. One million homeless people with high hopes who had returned to Kabul mostly from Pakistan and some from Iran lived on the sidewalks or in ruins left over from the bombardments. And since they had no jobs, they were suffering from hunger in the extreme and many were after the first opportunity to migrate to other countries again.
Q: What were their reactions to the film you were making?
Samira: My film was made with the same homeless people living on the sidewalks or in the ruins. At first they were afraid of the camera because they had no notion of cinema or if they did it was only of the musical cinema of India and Pakistan. When I asked girls and women if they were willing to play in my film they would blush and run away. Later I realized that the word “playing” in Afghanistan meant dancing and it was against their traditional culture.
Q: So how were they finally convinced to appear before the camera?
Samira: First my insistence and the fact that I lived among them for a while. That allowed me to gain their trust in this kind of cinema. Appearing every day before the camera became employment for them. On our first day in Kabul not one person was willing to play in the film but by our departure every request was met with a thousand people lining up to be in the film, even women.
Q: In your opinion is 5 in the Afternoon a realistic film?
Samira: Godard says that at first cinema was for showing reality but now it has led to entertainment. In the film I tried as much as possible not to entertain-–contrary to the style so much a part of the media--but also avoided passing any type of judgment. In that sense this film is similar to The Apple. I have tried to understand a father who is a supporter of the Taliban and their culture and a girl who opposes that culture and depict what exists not at present but what I prefer to exist.
I chose the film’s characters among ordinary people and got the film’s details from their lives. I picked up much of the dialogue while searching for actors and locations and from what I heard from ordinary people in the streets or markets and re-enacted them in the film. In contrast to those who are used to simplify complex matters I haven’t tried to blame the Taliban for all the problems or with their fall, like the American reportage, portray a non-existent well being after the conquest of Afghanistan by Rambo.
This film aims to understand and show the mystery of this region’s backwardness and the hidden war between the two generations of the past and present and the differences that exist between men and women’s situations.
As far as the realities of Afghanistan are concerned, this film is quite realistic in my opinion. On the one hand it also looks at the poetic side of cinema and not because one of the characters is a poet and reads a poem in the film.
Q: Why did you use Lorca’s poem in the film?
Samira: Before final editing I had used even more of Lorca’s poem but I manipulated it and it was not Lorca’s any more. According to Pablo Neruda no poem has a poet. Each reader of a poem is the poet of that poem at that moment. The poet of this poem was also the poet character of 5 in the Afternoon who changed Lorca’s poem that was written for the death of a Spanish matador into a poem for the death of a cow.
He believed that poetry not only is inspired by the poet’s nature but the poem in essence is nature and since nature is aware of nature then a sheep as part of nature would also understand a poem written for the death of a cow. However, in the final editing I changed my mind and only used the poem as an allusion.
But to answer your question as to how this poem relates to the film, I suggest you see the film and the sequence of the conversation between the poet and the girl. In fact I even thought of naming the film Conversation between a Poet and a Girl.
In the film there’s a part where the poet says, “When someone fears to appear and lecture for the people but has to, like all presidents do, he probably starts practicing by reading poems to the cows so he can dare say stupid things without being afraid of his audience.”
At the same time the rhythm of this poem emphasizing on an epochal context such as the repetition of “5 in the afternoon” is much more mysterious to me. I prefer that to lowering the poem from its apex of form and feeling to the ordinary prose of a political, literary or philosophical interpretation.
Q: How do you evaluate the film’s characters? The father or the daughter for example?
Samira: Noqreh’s father represents the old generation or the traditional culture of Afghanistan. He is a religious, pious and fanatic man. Whatever he does in terms of good or bad is related to a cultural and traditional cause. What he does, more than resulting from a personal will stems from a historical will. The older generations have already decided for him—they also being from a past generation--on how he should be. He believes in male chauvinism not because he is selfish or because he is a man. If he were a woman he would have accepted male chauvinism too, because the culture has taught him that way.
Then there is his daughter who is the symbol of the new generation. Hers is a generation whose sufferings are caused by practicing this traditional old culture. A generation imprisoned at home because the old culture did not approve of women coming out of their homes. Despite the respect that she has for her poor father, this girl is heedless to what comes from the past culture and she even opposes it. But now she is in a situation wherein on the surface she acquiesces to the old culture but inside makes faces at and runs away from it.
Q: Why is the film’s ending so sad?
Samira: Both these generations of fathers and children have been caught up in an ominous political and economic history and geography. It is a home burning in the fire of tribalism, bigotry, ignorance and poverty. The survival of anyone from this inferno of a house is impossible without rescuing others.
Prisoner and prison guard, past generation and present happen to be related to each other too. It is not like after an armed conflict or a foreign military attack, the problems rooted in this land would be resolved overnight. Democracy, contrary to what the mass media claims is not a project to be created by military action or regime change.
Democracy is a process. As fascism was a process. Fascism just like cancer is an internal deformation. It is not an external wound to be healed by dressing it and it is not an infected abscess to be cured by surgery. The treatment of the disease of fascism requires both time and finances.
Since Afghanistan is poor she does not have the money to pay for the cost of passing from fascism into democracy. The world is also not willing to pay the price. So how can I be optimistic and why should the film end with the salvation of Afghanistan with Rambo-like optimism?
Q: There are scenes in the film where men turn towards the wall when women pass by. Are these scenes real?
Samira: The same thing happened to me in Afghanistan. The first time in Kabul Hotel--yes even in the hotel--when a man saw me on the staircase he turned towards the wall to avoid seeing me. I stood behind him and asked him the reason why. Instead of answering me his hands began shaking in rage to the extent that I felt if I insisted he would imagine himself in the depths of hell.
Q: Your first film was made in Tehran, the capital of Iran. Your second film along the border of Iran and Iraq in Kurdistan and your third film outside of Iran. Have you become a filmmaker without frontiers?
Samira: My father believes that if there are doctors without frontiers we can have filmmakers without frontiers as well. Basically, cinema does not have any frontiers. If it did then we Iranians would have only seen Iranian movies and you French would have only seen French films. On the other hand if America on the pretext of the destruction of a building attacks anywhere on earth for their interests, why shouldn’t a filmmaker make movies for the people who are victims of expansionist policies, profiteering economics and fanatic culture?
Again, on the other hand this film is not only about Afghanistan but it could have very well have happened in Iran. In today’s environment in Afghanistan I was able to express myself easier. (I used) words that can’t even be expressed in Iran today. The events of this film can also happen in many other eastern countries.
The Taliban were not the only group who ruled Afghanistan for a number of years. The Taliban is our backwardness. The Taliban are sometimes our history manifested as contemporary politics. The Taliban are sometimes our education and training. The Taliban are the laws dominating our social life. The Taliban are sometimes the unwritten laws that we carry out for fear of God or greed for heaven. The Taliban are any fanatic government. The Taliban are the group around the fascist Bush in the democratic society of America. Bin Laden is a Talib. Bush is a Talib. Samira Makhmalbaf is a Talib. Let me conjugate the word Taliban.
I am a Talib.
You are a Talib.
He is a Talib.
We are Taliban.
You are Taliban.
They are Taliban.
Those who think democracy is a project and can be implemented by military operations in every region will not agree with 5 in the Afternoon.
Q: When and where did you shoot the film?
Samira: In the fall of 2002, in the outskirts of Kabul.
Q: The actors in your film are not professional. How did you direct them?
Samira: None of the actors are professional. In Afghanistan cinema had long ago come to a standstill. Even before the Taliban’s banning of the cinema Afghan cinema had produced less than 40 short and long films throughout the 100-year history of cinema. We can conclude that Afghanistan lacks cinema or professional actors. The making of 5 in the Afternoon, however, had one benefit and that was presenting a few Afghan actors and actresses of her own to Afghanistan for the rebirth of a new cinema in Afghanistan. I hope that the girl, the father, the poet and the old man listening to music in the film will all become professional actors in Afghan cinema. And how did I direct them? I tried not to make them act but asked them to be themselves.
Q: Tell me about the character of Noqreh.
Samira: Noqreh the actress in my film is the same age as myself. She has three children and since her husband had been missing since the American attack she was working as a teacher in a school to support her children. I had a hard time to convince her to play the role but now she loves the cinema and looks forward to acting in another movie. By playing in this film she helped Afghan women to overcome their fear of cinema.
April/2003
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
