‘Kabul I Love You’ brings Afghan woes to cinemas

KABUL, Afghanistan - A decade after the fall of the cinema-hating Taliban, a group of Afghan directors has created a film love letter to their capital, rooted in the grim reality of everyday life in the war-torn city.

Forced marriage, people smuggling, illegal land grabs, land mines and ethnic conflict - life in Kabul is not short of problems, and “Kabul I Love You” explores them through 10 interwoven stories.

Afghanistan’s film industry was hammered by 17 years of war after the Soviet invasion in 1979 and was snuffed out entirely under the extreme rule of the Taliban.

During their 1996-2001 regime, the hardliners closed cinemas and hung televisions from lampposts, regarding all images as un-Islamic. Even sculptures were targeted, with the famous giant Buddhas of Bamiyan paying the price.

Now Afghan cinema is struggling to re-emerge amid a wrecked economy and an ongoing insurgency against the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.

Afghanistan produces around 100 films a year, according to documentary-maker Malek Shafi’i, but they are shot on tiny budgets and are often very poor.

“Kabul I Love You” has been funded by the UN mission in Afghanistan, Unama, as a means of giving the country’s cinema a boost. Ario Soltani, from Unama, says the idea was to encourage filmmakers to develop their own ideas. “We wanted to reach the filmmakers, to support them, to communicate with the Afghan people,” he said.

“Not with our messages but with theirs. We hope they reflect the Afghan society and the Afghan ideas of that time.”

The funding project was not an unqualified success - one of the 11 directors chosen from 200 applicants fled the country as soon as he got his hands on Unama’s $8,000, while another left for Iran after being threatened. But despite these setbacks, the film was shot and got a warm reception when it was screened at the French cultural center in Kabul in May.

The directors are raw and parts of the film betrayed their lack of experience - exaggerated characters, hammy dialogue and deathly slow pace.

NATO forces are due to depart Afghanistan by the end of 2014 and the precarious security situation they will leave behind is not likely to be conducive to this dream of artistic growth.

Saying “Kabul I Love You” is a message of hope from these budding filmmakers for their future.

AFP