The Forbidden Reel: Award-Winning Doc Explores Film’s Starring Role in Afghan Culture
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
Films of whirling Sufi dancers, calvary soldiers in the city streets, seventies’ couples in the hipster clothes, Bollywood-style dancing, scenes from melodramas, official documentaries and modern psychological dramas. These are just a few of the images of Afghanistan in The Forbidden Reel, a National Film Board documentary by Ariel Nasr that explores the place of film in the country’s collective memory.
Early in this two-hour film — which won the Rogers Audience Choice award at this year’s Hot Docs Festival — the camera crew visits to the Kabul headquarters of the national film agency, Afghan Film. The administrators there describe how, back in 1996, Taliban forces demanded administrators hand over every film to be destroyed on pain of death.
Instead, the agency staff, who had advance warning from a film-loving enemy, hid a treasure of Afghanistan film reels behind a false wall. For film history buffs, the story recalls the case of Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque Française, who used similar subterfuge to save thousands of classic films from Nazi destruction.
The Forbidden Reel tells Afghan’s modern history through selective archival film clips, some 16mm recreations, and a handful of interviews. The subjects include director and former head of Afghan Film, “Engineer” Latif Ahmadi, who as a director, produced a half-dozen features in the eighties before going into exile in Russia until the 2001 American invasion.
There’s Yusuf Jannesar, who learned cinematography to capture reconnaissance footage with the Muhajadeen guerillas. Director Siddiq Barmak (director of the 2003 Golden Globe-winning drama, Osama), also joined with anti-government forces, who would set up screens in their camps to watch favourite movies. One-time star Yasamin Yarmal talks about how she carried a feminist message in her dramas in the Soviet-occupied 1980s.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
For critical perspective, there’s Mariam Ghani, an American artist and academic (Bennington College) who champions the preservation and distribution of Afghan cinema and happens to be the daughter of the current Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, which Mariam acknowledges has opened some doors.
The spirit of these interviews is about the common love of cinema across political lines as The Forbidden Reel seems to counter negative stereotypes about Afghanistan. Instead of the primitive ungovernable country marked as “grave of empires,” what we see instead are images of a lively and urbane culture that existed both before the 1970s and again with the emergence of a national artist-driven cinema in the eighties.
Was the cinema really that good? Until the next Afghanistan cinema retrospective, all we have to rely on here is the testimony of its creators and the few fascinating clips we see: I’m keen to see more of the social class critique in Akhtar, The Joker (1981) and the artist-marries-a-rich-girl drama The Statues Are Laughing (1976).
Nasr’s ability to match footage with critical moments in Afghanistan’s actual history is immensely impressive, but the history itself is often bewildering, with repeated civil wars, factions within factions, and occupation by the two major superpowers. A more conventional timeline or narrator guide would help to provide some basic information. We are left with no real idea, for example, about the current state of film restoration and digitization process.
The last word here goes to Mariam Ghani, on the importance of archives as an antidote to present ideological sensitivities, a way to “to seal off these histories and keep them until the moment when it’s safe to look at them again.”
The Forbidden Reel. Directed by Ariel Nasr. With Mariam Ghani, “Engineer” Latif Ahmadi, Siddiq Barmak and Yasamin Yarmal. Now available online across Canada in co-operation with Cinéma du Parc, Cinéma du Musée and Vancity Theatre.