Afghans Get Acts Together

Abdul Hamid Ghaznawee dreamed of becoming Afghanistan’s “Arnold”--a new action star like Schwarzenegger. As long as the Taliban was in power, he kept this ambition secret, like the videos he watched at home.

But as soon as the radical Islamic regime was toppled and its ban on film and television lifted, the 17-year-old showed up at the studios of Afghan Film, looking for a movie role.

His act of naive optimism paid off. Ghaznawee landed the leading part in “Teardrops,” the first Afghan film of the post-Taliban era. The movie, shot on a $300 budget, describes a young man’s descent into drug addiction. It will air on Afghan television soon.

As the country leaves behind a generation of occupation and war, the Afghan film scene is witnessing a burst of creative energy. Poets, screenwriters and directors are emerging as if from a dark age, talking excitedly of projects conceived in secret during the rule of the mullahs.

Writers who worked furtively on scripts, hiding them even from family members, are out in the open again, seeking backers for their inspirations. Directors are shooting films, or planning them. The works range from a Taliban love story with a tragic ending to the tale of a girl desperate to go to school.

This outpouring represents an artistic chronicle of the Taliban years, a meditation on what the country endured and how it was changed. Because money is scarce, many of the films under discussion won’t be made soon, if ever. But the act of imagining them seems to have been cathartic for an artistic community long repressed or ignored.

Shermohammad, a well-known Afghan screenwriter, secretly defied the Taliban for years, working on screenplays and poetry in his home.

“Film is very important in Afghanistan now because most people cannot read or write,” he said.

The writer, who, like many Afghans, uses just one name, tried to witness all the major events under the Islamic regime so that he could faithfully record them. He made sure he was at the parades, the executions, the public amputations of hands and feet.

He wrote haiku about what he saw. One describes the severed hands of convicted robbers hanging in the street, dripping blood, attracting flies. Another is about Taliban police beating women in the street.

Shermohammad is trying to interest directors in a screenplay about a forbidden love affair between a Taliban fighter and a young woman from Kabul, the capital. With the Taliban facing defeat, the fighter tries to hide in the woman’s house, but her father chases him into the street. In the final scene, she watches from a rooftop as an angry mob drags him away to be killed.

Shermohammad based the denouement on events he witnessed Nov. 13, the day the Taliban fled the city.

He got up early that day and cycled into the center of Kabul with his camera. He saw three Taliban fighters in a park, terrified, shooting at anyone who approached.

On another street, he saw several Talibs and people who he thought were Chechens--Islamic resistance fighters from the separatist Russian republic. A crowd was beating them. Then a man walked up with a gun.

“He just shot the Chechens in the head and killed them,” Shermohammad said.

Siddiq Barmak, 39, head of Afghan Film, a private production company in Kabul, has a clutch of screenplays created by young writers during the Taliban years.

One stood out--the story of a girl who isn’t allowed to go to school under the Taliban. She cuts her beloved hair and disguises herself as a boy. Then she is discovered by the religious police and beaten so badly that she becomes mute.

Barmak, who trained in the Soviet Union as a filmmaker, says the screenplay is based on a true story. He plans to make the film--if he can raise the money.

“We started to work on the story. We added an American woman character who is looking for poor people, to help them,” Barmak said, with all the pragmatism of a Hollywood director.

“Teardrops,” with 64 mostly amateur actors, is about the downfall of a diligent and popular young man who rises at 5 a.m. each day to pray and study. Then he starts sleeping late and getting into fights at school. His parents and teachers are mystified--until his father discovers his son among drug addicts in the war ruins of southern Kabul. The final shot shows the son’s face, wet with tears.

Ismail Azhir, 46, wrote the script during the Taliban era, taking elaborate precautions to avoid being found out.

“I kept the screenplay safely hidden in a false-bottomed drawer,” said Azhir, who is head of the film department of Afghan Radio and Television. “No one else saw the place, not even my family. But even so, I kept the dangerous and important scenes only in my memory.”

An anti-drug film such as “Teardrops” was risky, he said, because the Taliban, for part of its rule, allowed opium cultivation and trade.

“I was full of hope when I was writing that story,” he said. “I did believe the Taliban regime would be deposed, that there would be a new regime under which I could work and make my film a reality.”

Before and even during Afghanistan’s long decades of war, the country had a film industry. Women appeared on screen without covering their faces. Afghan producers, scriptwriters and directors boast that their movies were distinct from those produced by “Bollywood,” the Indian film industry that dominates the region. Afghan films, they say, were more serious, taking on tough social issues rather than light romantic themes.

Filmmakers continued their work as successive coups, a decade-long Soviet occupation and civil war shattered the country beginning in 1973. “Oruj,” made in 1995, celebrated the triumph of the moujahedeen over the Soviet occupiers.

A year later, the Taliban came to power, and painting, filmmaking and other forms of artistic expression were prohibited as idolatrous.

Since the collapse of the fundamentalist Islamic regime, movie theaters have reopened across Kabul, showing mostly old Indian and Iranian films on old Russian projectors. Afghanistan’s native film industry also is getting back on its feet, albeit slowly.

The making of “Teardrops” was plagued by electrical blackouts, equipment failures and other problems from start to finish. The actors, all beginners, had to be trained from scratch, on the set. There were no rehearsals. The production equipment consisted of one borrowed camera and an ancient floodlight, held aloft with a quivering arm by the light man.

“They didn’t have the proper substance for the scene where I had a bloody nose,” said Ghaznawee, the teenage actor. “They used red paint.”

The most difficult task was finding actresses willing to go before the camera without their burkas, the full-length covering most Afghan women still wear.

“We used to have a lot of actresses. But five years of the Taliban changed a lot, especially women,” Azhir said. “It’s difficult for them to remove their burkas and go on a film.”

The filmmakers approached a famous Afghan female singer about playing the part of the mother. The singer demanded $500 to appear--more than the film’s entire budget. They turned her down.

Then they found a woman who seemed happy to play the part--until she saw the man who would play her husband and changed her mind, without explanation.

Director Bahram Baryal finally cast Torpekai Sangeen, an Afghan woman who had lived in Germany for many years and was used to going out without a burka.

The role of a nurse who was to supposed to provide the film’s romantic interest was cut from the script because no actress could be found to play the part.

On the set, the interaction between director and cast reflected Afghanistan’s patriarchal society. Baryal, a diminutive man of 47, speaks so softly that it is difficult to hear him at times. But Ghaznawee found him intimidating.

“Whatever he said, I obeyed,” Ghaznawee said. “Once he was upset about my acting. There was a scene where I was supposed to be angry with my sister, but I couldn’t do it the first time. He was outraged and I was frightened, and the second time I did it very well.”

During filming of the final scenes at a Kabul high school in April, an extension cord blew out. The light cord was so short that light man David Mohammad couldn’t hold the heavy floodlight steady. Shadows danced on the wall behind the actors.

“Why is the light shaking so much?” the director asked in a reproving tone.

A boy hastened his repair of the extension cord, unscrewing the power socket with a key for lack of a screwdriver.

The director kept shooting, despite the jumping shadows. A few minutes later, the power went out.

Later, Baryal, who will be paid the equivalent of $10, said, “If Arnold could help us, it would be good.” He was referring, of course, to Schwarzenegger, who is huge in Afghanistan, his portrait bedecking many bodybuilding studios.

Despite the difficulties, Baryal said it felt good to make Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban film.

“I’m proud of it because I guess we have found a second life,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been born again.”