Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
The director of "Afghan Stories" talks about life in the final days of Taliban rule.
May 7, 2003 | There are two almost unbearably painful moments in Taran Davies' documentary "Afghan Stories." One assumes that a documentary about that tragic country, filmed while it was still in the death grip of the Taliban just weeks before the post-Sept. 11 American bombing campaign, would include a handful of heart-wrenching scenes. But these two stick out. In the first, a very young Afghan boy, sequestered with his large family in a small, spare Tajikistan apartment where they've fled the Taliban in hopes of someday reaching family members in Canada, sits in his mother's lap. At her urging, he sings in a tiny, predictably angelic voice, a song, or an anthem, for their lost Afghanistan.
The next scene is almost more important: At the end of the film, Davies replays the tape for the child's relatives in Canada. And Davies' story of ordinary Afghans -- some displaced, some enjoying new lives in a Western world about to wage war on their brothers -- comes full circle. The boy, himself living in exile, is singing to his Afghan grandmother about yearning for Afghanistan, while she sits crying in the modern comforts of a Western living room.
After all, as Davies explained to Salon, while he wanted to help Westerners understand the Afghans, "Afghan Stories" is also about the different ways citizens deal with a shattered homeland. The film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and opened in New York last week (you can catch it on the Sundance Channel on May 19 at 10 p.m.), is one of the few documentaries to emerge about Afghanistan since Sept. 11.
Davies, a former New York investment banker and part-time filmmaker (his other film, about the Chechen conflict, is called "Mountain Men and Holy Wars," also on the Sundance Channel, May 19, 9 p.m.), had a distinct advantage: A friend of a friend named Walied Osman, an Afghan-American entrepreneur, volunteered to accompany Davies on his trip. In the beginning of the film, Osman relates his sister's reaction to the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Immediately, she said, Afghanistan should be bombed.
Osman's story is a reassuring indication that Davies will ably convey the complicated feelings that Afghans have about their country and the West. What Davies and Osman found might have been a broken country, but the Afghans they interviewed, fully knowing that bombs would fall on their homes in days, had hope for the future. In the film, Davies spends a great deal of time with Ad Sharza, a charismatic and surprisingly cheerful Afghan man who now lives in Queens, N.Y. In Afghanistan, Davies and Osman lived for a while with Ahmad Shamsadin, an esteemed Islamic cleric -- without ever meeting any of the female members of his household.
Salon spoke to Davies, now 32, about warlords, reporters hungry for war footage, and the Afghans' expectations of their new relationship with the West.
You were a banker. Why did you decide to make "Afghan Stories"?
My office was just a couple of blocks away from the World Trade Center and I live in TriBeCa, so I witnessed everything. Like everyone else I was moved to help in some way, as much for myself as anyone else. Because I had traveled so extensively and made films in that part of the world, I felt like Afghanistan was a place I could get to easily. We sensed that the U.S. was about to bomb Afghanistan and I thought I could bring some understanding to that. In the U.S. we had very little sense of who the Afghans were. When I left for Afghanistan, there was only one film being shown on CNN, "Beneath the Veil," which served a great purpose but, I felt, didn't give us a sense of who the ordinary Afghans were, the ones who weren't terrorists or refugees, the ones leading quasi-normal lives. These were the people we were going to bomb, too.
Was Walied Osman, the Afghan-American who accompanied you on your trip, a friend?
He was a friend of my girlfriend. When I told him my idea, he immediately said he wanted to come. We met 10 days after Sept. 11 and we left Oct. 15. In about two weeks, we went from our meeting to having arranged everything we needed to do to get into Afghanistan -- including [dealing with] the moment when one tells one's parents.
What did your parents say?
My mother rang my girlfriend up and said, "Natalie, under any other circumstances, I would never ask anything like this. But just tell Taran that you're pregnant."
Can you give a sense of how dangerous a trip this was? What were other Afghan-Americans telling you?
Everyone's counsel was not to go. That was why we went to meet Ad Sharza, Walied's family friend. I wanted to go live with Afghan families and tell their stories. As Sharza said to us, at any time this would be impossible, let alone at a time of war, because two young men staying with Afghan women is impossible. And he was right. When we were living with the Islamic elder Ahmed Shamsadin, we never once in the weeks that we stayed with him saw his female relatives.
Can you talk a little bit about Sharza?
Sharza had traveled back to Afghanistan at the invitation of the Rabbani government to help rebuild the Afghan airline. That government was captured by the Taliban and Sharza had to go to jail.
He said one of the most shocking things in the film -- that someone should just drop a bomb on Afghanistan and obliterate it. What did you make of that?
Sharza is more patriotic than anyone else I met. He loves his country unquestionably, so his comment shouldn't be taken too literally. He was suggesting that Afghanistan had become reduced to nothing over the past 24 years. It had been beaten down to nothingness. It's a country that could no longer see into the future or remember their past. He is an extraordinary character, a really good man. At the bottom of his heart all he wants is the restoration of his country.
Does he want to return?
I think he longs for it desperately.
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