Victory after exile

The making of every film is an uphill journey, and the beginning of this one seemed more hopeless than most, conceived as it was while the director was in exile in Pakistan. Afghan director Siddiq Barmak wanted to tell a story about what life was really like in his country under the rule of the Taliban, life with all its daily precautions and terror. But would he ever be able to return to do so?

Then the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and the Taliban fell. Barmak was able to return and make a motion picture even as his country was amid its slow and arduous recovery from the devastation of foreign occupations.

Two days after his film “Osama” won this year’s Golden Globe for best foreign film, Barmak, 42, sits in a room at the posh St. Regis Hotel in Los Angeles. Dressed in a tailored black suit, he is a heavyset man with a ready smile. Only the deep furrow of his brow might suggest what he has seen and endured during the years in which his country was overrun by the extremist Taliban.

“They created a new religion which was a horror and terror, which was not Islam,” Barmak says. “It was a different thing. You [outside Afghanistan] got a lot of information but incomplete information. I wanted to make this film to show the dark side of our life, because even for our people, some never touched this reality.”

The inspiration for “Osama” came from a newspaper article Barmak read while in Pakistan. It told of an Afghan girl who wanted to be educated, so she cut her hair and disguised herself as a boy to go to school, which girls were forbidden to do. The Taliban arrested her and beat the school’s principal.

Inspired and outraged, Barmak wrote a script about an adolescent girl (played by Marina Golbahari) who is forced by the desperate circumstances of her family to disguise herself as a boy called Osama.

Taliban’s rules

The Taliban’s oppression of women is by now well known: Women were forbidden to work, could go outside the home only when accompanied by a male relative and enshrouded by a burka. A special Taliban force would patrol the streets, beating and arresting women who broke these or the many other rules, which multiplied with time.

“Osama,” which is the first Afghan film to be made in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban, begins with the girl’s mother losing her job at a hospital when it is shut down by the Taliban authorities. (Barmak intentionally did not give any of the female characters names.) She needs an escort to go out to seek work to support the family, so it is decided that her daughter will pose as a boy -- her hair is cut and Osama is “born.”

One day, members of the Taliban, who believe she is a boy, haul her off to a madrassa, a religious school that also provides military training. In addition to reciting the Koran, the boys are subjected to detailed and seemingly endless instructions on how to bathe oneself -- scenes that are both hilarious and harrowing given the gender situation. In another Kafkaesque scene, women who are celebrating a modest wedding (with an absent groom) are suddenly warned of a visit by Taliban police. They know they shouldn’t be having any happy celebrations, so they quickly pull burkas over their heads and begin to prostrate themselves and moan. When the police show up, they are told the women are observing a funeral.

Barmak picked up such details from from refugees as well as from those who had stayed behind in Kabul. “This film is a combination of true stories,” he says.

As a teenager, Barmak began by working on film sets as an assistant, then studied film direction at Moscow University. “At that time, it was one of the possibilities for me, because we had been invaded by the Soviets, and everything was closed to the other world,” he says. “The Soviets gave scholarships in many fields. I received one of these scholarships.”

The film industry in Afghanistan has never been active. It is estimated that in all fewer than 40 films, both short and feature length, have been produced domestically. After finishing his studies in Moscow, Barmak returned home and became head of the Afghan Film Organization, set up to help produce, distribute and archive films in what was basically a state monopoly on the industry. This was not a good position to have when the Taliban took over in 1996. The fundamentalist Taliban was against all entertainment, banning music and closing movie theaters. Threatened with arrest, Barmak escaped to Pakistan with his wife and son.

“After two months I felt it was not the place for me because I was looking to make a film,” the director says. “So I went by north to Afghanistan and went to a place which was not under the control of the Taliban. I lived for 2 1/2 years in the northern provinces.”

There he shot some documentary footage and dreamed of what he would do when he returned home, which he did after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. In 2002 he met the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (“Kandahar”) and told him his idea for “Osama.” “He was so moved by this story, he offered money to make this movie,” Barmak says. That initial $100,000 -- and various technical assistance -- started the project rolling. (Eventually, co-production funding from Japan’s NHK and Ireland’s leBroquy Fraser Ltd. was found, and the money returned.)

Filling a key role

The cast of “Osama” is entirely nonprofessional, including the 12-year-old girl who plays Osama. Barmak searched schools, refugee camps and orphanages, seeing some 3,000 candidates for this pivotal role. Then one day on the streets of Kabul, he found her. “She was begging,” he says. He was captivated by her eyes. “Her eyes were amazing, maybe because they were a little teary. These eyes were telling me a lot of things.”

Barmak located her parents, and they agreed to let her work with him. Marina, one of 13 children, had never seen a film, although she had seen the destruction wrought by the Taliban occupation and by war. Her father had been badly beaten by the Taliban, and she had seen her sister killed by an explosion.

Much of the film was shot on location in Kabul and it was completed in an intense 42 days. There were many technical problems to overcome -- the lack of equipment for one, the lack of electricity for another. There was also some local resistance. At one point, the owner of a house they were shooting in decided to rescind his permission, accusing the film of being anti-Islam. The director thought quickly and offered an additional $100 fee, which was accepted.

Barmak chose to tell the actors the story day by day, not giving the whole plot away, and shot more or less in sequence. “I really wanted to make my film based on reactions,” he says. “I never gave them a chance to know what would happen next.”

He is pleased with the results. “They brought a lot of their own experiences to this film,” he says. “They were very natural, very marvelous.”

Marina’s life has changed dramatically with the making of the film. Last year “Osama” opened to popular acclaim in her country, and she won a best actress award at the Cinefan Asian Film Festival in New Delhi. Barmak also shared a film award of $10,000 with her, and with that her family was able to buy a house. She is now attending school and wants to pursue an acting career.

Barmak is looking forward to making many more films in his country. “We don’t have oil in Afghanistan,” he says, “but we do have many stories.”