Story of Burqa: Case of a Confused Afghan
A film by Brishkay Ahmed

Story of Burqa is playing at DOXA 2012 Film Festival on May 10 at 7pm at the Empire Granville 7 Cinemas in Vancouver. 

There's an old saying that clothes make the man. The flip side of that might be that the burqa unmakes the woman -- rendering her a non-person in the eyes of the beholder. This is the conclusion one would draw after seeing Brishkay Ahmed's Story of Burqa, a documentary looking into the obscure origins of this controversial garment.

Ahmed goes to Afghanistan to talk with the makers and sellers of the burqa (almost exclusively men, it would seem) and also with those who are obliged to wear it for fear of punitive acid attacks or beatings by the men around them. Aside from one politically correct blonde lady who suggests that while the stifling and vision-obscuring burqa isn't right for her, but might be right for others, most of the wearers interviewed are quite clear about their distaste for it. Interestingly, some of the most emotional objectors to the burqa are Afghan men who remember how the Taliban and previous groups of religious fanatics forced the burqa upon their women, along with other arbitrary restrictions based on the Taliban's grim Wahabbi-influenced doctrine. They demand Ahmed take it away, almost as if the cloth would infect them with some horrible Taliban germ (and one can hardly blame them).

For more than half my life, I've been a self-appointed one-woman ambassador for Afghanistan, pointing out to anyone who would listen that there is more to Afghanistan than kalashnikovs, burqas and poppies. In no doubt sometimes irritating persistence, I've tried my level best to convey to fellow outsiders the Afghanistan that I know, a country where resilient, brave, complicated people just go on living their lives amidst the calamities that have befallen them, when our media in the West tends to focus more on their victimization, their hostile deviants, or the spectacular break-down of their state. Both pictures are valid parts of the story, but the shrouding of Afghanistan's beauty as embodied in its people, landscapes, history, arts and rich culture, is a deficit in our understanding of Afghanistan, and it's one of some consequence. It's an imbalance I believe has helped fuel indifference towards a people we can more easily then say, hardly exist.

War is woven into the fabric of everyday life in Afghanistan, but so are dinner parties, over-the-top weddings, giggling school girls, men on the street bickering over endless cups of chai sabz, students bustling in and out of university classes, families watching generator-powered Bollywood soap operas together in the twilight, rubab concerts, and love-stricken teenagers sending each other flirty text messages. It's often easy to forget the violence pervading the country, when one is so swiftly absorbed into the rhythm of the daily life that must go on, in wartime as in peacetime.

But the violence sometimes sharply and suddenly penetrates the ilusory seamlessness of everyday life, with painful reminders of the demons still looming over this society trying so valiantly to move on. When this happens, my enthusiastic descriptions of the 'other Afghanistan,' the beautiful and brave Afghanistan, feel fabricated, somehow fraudulent. The increasing frequency of bombs going off closeby, of assassinations, kidnappings and 'complex attacks' on places one frequents casually and often as in 'normal life' like hotels, grocery stores, malls, restaurants, embassies, and offices causes a slide towards the mindset of being in a warzone. The requisite constant state of alertness and often well justified paranoia, the fretting anxiety for the safety of oneself and others, can start to subsume the assertion that Afghanistan is also a place of good and of beauty.

US Navy-fighter pilot Dieter Dengler is stationed at the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War 1965. In a top-secret mission with his squadron over Laos he gets hit during the maneuver and falls into the jungle, where he soon finds himself in the hands of the Vietcong.

The story in “Rescue Dawn” is as close as possible to the story of the real Dengler. The hero's ensuing struggle to escape symbolizes a larger fight for freedom. He refuses to sign an anti-US propaganda paper of the North Vietnamese bureau (which would have been worthless in any case). He shouts at the North Vietnamese officer that America made it possible to fulfill his dreams. He would never sign a paper blaming America. It's clear that nothing can stop this character's determination to escape.

Director Werner Herzog is himself an adventurer. In his biography and in the story of the making of his famous movie “Aguirre: The Wrath Of God” and “Fitzcarraldo”, you enter the mind of a man who is willing to die for his art and his profession. In his films, his inner self and his protagonists characters he is interested in are closely related.

Watch the movie and enjoy the journey of a man who wants to be free, fighting brutal repression and the merciless forces of nature far from civilization.

Niklas Anzinger is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist

Iranium, the documentary film about Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions, has gotten glowing reviews. Glowing? Uranium? Get it? OK, fine. Just watch the movie!

The film Mugabe And The White African, about the rogue regime in Zimbabwe, serves as a compelling case study of dictatorship and absence of the rule of law. From the Christian Science Monitor:

While the catastrophes he has brought upon Zimbabwe are, in general terms, covered by international news outlets – who have not been exempt from his attempts to control all press coverage – the new documentary “Mugabe and the White African” ups the emotional ante by putting a human face on his victims. As the title suggests, it’s primarily a white face – a fact that, given the country’s colonial past, might seem lightly ironic, were the details not so brutal.

As political propaganda films go, Oliver Stone's sycophantic pean to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, South of the Border, is an unmitigated failure.

Chavez has undermined democracy and the rule of law in his country. In the tradition of modern tyrants everywhere, he has shut down media outlets that show the slightest opposition to his regime. He has packed the civil service with apparatchiks and made loyalty to his own political brand the key metric for hiring and firing. And he has utterly wrecked the Venezuelan economy, including even the oil industry from which he sucks out cash to finance his Bolivarian revolution.

For all this, Chavez is not direct military threat to the USA. Russian-bought T-72 tanks with Venezuelan markings will not be rolling into Washington anytime in the conceivable future. The threat has been indirect, as a Castro-lite regime attempts to influence the development of a wider South American socialist bloc of countries.

Oliver Stone's flick overlooks Chavez' failings and presents him and other Latin American socialist leaders as visionaries and heroes. But nobody is buying it; least of all, the people Chavez keeps under his boot.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that "Despite round-the-clock promotion on Venezuelan state television and government-subsidized screenings in the capital of Caracas, local moviegoers have largely stayed away. The film grossed only $18,601 on 20 screens in the 12 days after its June 4 debut." Compare that with the $2.1 million grossed by the Michael Jackson documentary "This Is It" in Venezuela.

Ticket sales in the rest of the continent were correspondingly small, maxing out at $40,000 in Argentina and $21,000 in Brazil.

What does it all mean? It seems you can lead an oppressed population to the cinema, but you can't make them watch your awful movie -- and you definitely can't get them to pay for the privilege.

Jonathon Narvey is the Editor of The Propagandist