An Unflinching View

In “Beneath the Veil,” London-based documentarian Saira Shah takes a personal trip back to the homeland of her father and delivers a critical look at the difficult life, for women in particular, under the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan.

The film is seeing new life in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks on the East Coast, and their probable connection to Afghanistan, which has given sanctuary to prime suspect Osama bin Laden. Tonight at 8 and Sunday at 4 p.m., CNN will rebroadcast the one-hour program, which originally aired on England’s Channel Four in June and on CNN on Aug. 26. It also has aired in other countries.

The film, with unflinching, sometimes gruesome images of executions, massacre victims, filth, poverty and underground resistance, has become timely, “regrettably,” says Shah, from London, where she has just finished a film about Colombia and oil and is looking for her next freelance assignment.

Previously on staff at Channel Four’s nightly news, Shah, who is 36 and the U.K.-born daughter of an Afghani father and Indian mother, was hired by Channel Four last October to make the film. Her team included experienced war cameraman James Miller and director Cassian Harrison. The director, says Shah, “normally does beautiful, historical documentaries, and this was his first time in the region, so he was seeing it with very fresh eyes.”

The team made several trips over the next six months, touring refugee camps in Pakistan, and both rebel-and Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan. Shah went in on her own at one point with the help of the women’s resistance group RAWA--the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan--which also supplied graphic hidden camera footage of a woman, veiled in bright blue, being executed in a public sports stadium with a gunshot to the head.

Part of the documentary’s appeal is the extraordinary amount of footage the team was able to obtain, despite the Taliban’s ban on filming; conditions set out on the team’s visas stated they were not to film any living thing or speak to women.

Filmmaking was both scary and saddening, Shah says. On one trip, isolated, destitute villagers mistook the team for United Nations relief workers, which was “a horrible moment, it was so disappointing to them when they found out the truth.”

Shah says she was often scared, “and I think it kind of shows in the video diaries.” And she says, “Kabul is a horrible place, a beautiful city and I love it, but it’s become a horrible place after the war. It was raining, cold, people are miserable, and you never warm up because there’s no heating” and limited electricity.

Several times the team was caught filming and hauled in by police, once for merely taking a picture of an onion seller. “It was so hard to take it seriously and then suddenly it was serious,” Shah says of the trip to the police offices, where the team switched to another camera and kept filming.

One scary episode when the team was caught turned into a coup, when the Taliban officials unexpectedly offered tea, which arrived “after 20 minutes of small talk, which was tortuous.” The head of intelligence then escorted Shah on an on-camera tour to show off proudly the strict control measures.

Indeed, one of the elements that most impressed CNN was that Shah was able to get both sides of the story, with extensive comment from Taliban leaders, says Vivian Schiller, senior vice president for CNN Productions. Schiller says one of the things that most struck CNN was not the undercover video but a Taliban official commenting that if Western officials are upset that the soccer stadium they funded is now used for executions then they should give more money to build a separate execution site.

“It’s the perfect movie,” Schiller says: “Newsworthy, journalistically sound, balanced and a compelling personal story.” Still, she says, “we didn’t quite understand at the time how important it would truly be to have this very personal look about life under the Taliban.”

CNN acquired broadcast rights from Channel Four after thoroughly vetting the film, looking at the original interview transcripts and having its own interpreters go over the translations.

Schiller says such measures are standard due diligence, “just to be on the safe side, because the film had provocative sound bites from Taliban representatives and we wanted to make sure we understood what the questions were.”

CNN nearly doubled its usual Sunday night “CNN Presents” audience when it aired the documentary in August; Shah, whose father died in 1996, says her e-mails indicate that the film “seems to have struck some sort of chord with people,” which pleases her because “I care desperately about Afghanistan and I wanted to explain to people why they should care.”

After last week’s attacks, Shah says she first felt “horror and shock that it happened, and then a desperate feeling of hoping it would turn out not to be anything to do with the country.” Now, she says, she fears for the “thousands of people ... who are really innocent and had no choice in the Taliban coming to power. We don’t know what shape retaliation might take, but if it comes, the Taliban will jump into bunkers and be fine.”

Her other fear, she says, is the U.S. will try a quick-fix type of military retribution, with no long-term economic infrastructure follow-up, and if so, “I can absolutely guarantee that there will be another Islamic terror network in two years .... The most important thing is to take away the vacuum in which Islamic terror can flourish, and I am slightly despairing because I don’t think that will happen.”

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“Beneath the Veil” can be seen tonight at 8 and Sunday at 4 p.m. The documentary is unrated but will carry the following disclaimer: The following program contains graphic images that may be disturbing to some viewers.