User Reviews

The film's great success with audiences was in part due to the timing of its release, at a moment when Afghanistan had been catapulted into the headlines by the activities of the Taliban and the attacks of September 11, 2001…

But the motion picture, directed by one of Iran's most prominent film artists, is much more than a story pulled out from the headlines… It stars Nelofer Pazira, a female journalist, based in Canada, playing Nafas, who is trying to get into Afghanistan to reach her sister who lives in Kandahar… Nafas's sister is threatening suicide because of the intolerable oppression of women by the Taliban…

In the course of her long and dangerous journey, Nafas encounters a mixed array of Afghan people, many of them refugees… An old man agrees to take her into the country disguised as his fourth wife… Later she acquires a young boy, Khak (Sadou Teymouri), as her guide after he has been expelled from a religious school… On the way she meets Tabib Sahid, an African-American who had come to fight the Soviets but who is now practicing medicine…

"Kandahar" mixes documentary authenticity with extraordinary moments of visual strangeness ad beauty… The Burka is an ever-present symbol of women's subjugation, yet underneath women wear varnished nails and lipstick, and their brightly-colored robes affirm their individuality… The film placed the suffering of the Afghan people, particularly the women, on an international stage

Filmed on the Iran/Afghanistan border, KANDAHAR is a semi-documentary style movie that chronicles the perilous journey undertaken by an expatriate female journalist, Nafas, to reach the city of Kandahar, where she hopes to rescue her sister from committing suicide during an impending eclipse. However, Nafas's odyssey is really little more than a device to lift the veil on the poverty and hardship of life in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Through a series of vignettes, the movie succeeds beautifully in revealing insights that are both fascinating and harrowing. It is almost impossible to imagine a culture so far removed from the relatively comfortable life enjoyed by more ‘civilised' nations. Young boys rock back and forth, reciting the Koran while learning to become Mullahs, pausing only to recite the meaning and purpose of the sabre and semi-automatic machine gun when prompted by their teacher; young girls have lessons in how to resist the temptation to pick up possibly booby-trapped dolls; a doctor treats his female patient by speaking to them via children as they sit either side of a makeshift screen, and conducts his examinations through a small hole in the screen; the threat and consequences of land-mines pervade everybody's life, and year-long waits for prosthetic legs are commonplace, so that prosthetics become a black-market currency.

True, the acting is poor – most of the cast are non-professionals, many never even having seen a moving picture before appearing in this film – but, the purpose of this movie was not to dazzle us with superior acting; it was to open an eye to the hardship endured by both men and women in an oppressive regime, and, at this, it succeeds beautifully.

I amazed with Hindu devotional song used in background.

It reminds that all god are same one and only but we pray at differently.

I have seen good movie, second to About Elly. Good movie. must watch.

It pictured day to day life of Afghan women.

It induce lot of inner questions like Dr. in this film.

Why should all happen for that people? why they can not like others in this world?

Director & lead charter in this story done marvelous work.

All charter brings the really in their face.

I love background music , really fantastic.

When you see `Kandahar,' it's almost impossible to believe that you're watching a film set in the late 20th Century. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film takes place in Afghanistan in the latter days of the Taliban regime, when women were not merely viewed as second class citizens, but were denied any form of education or civil rights and even had to go out in public covered from head to toe to prevent men from seeing their faces. The filmmaker takes us to the heart of this alien and frightening world and makes us see, perhaps for the first time on the big screen, just how horrific life was for women in that time and place.

`Kandahar' is less a narrative film than a series of fascinating vignettes that drive home the realities of life in that part of the world. What plot there is involves the efforts of a female Canadian journalist to sneak back into her native country to prevent her desperate sister in Kandahar from committing suicide at the next solar eclipse. But that is really just a string on which to hang the individual pearls that make up the film. What is of primary interest to both the filmmaker and the audience are the various people the journalist encounters and the many experiences she undergoes. Hidden beneath her own burka, she witnesses firsthand the devastating poverty, the utter degradation and de-humanization of women, and the authoritarian oppression that defined life in that country during the Taliban rule. Along the way, she meets an American doctor who is trying his hardest to in some way relieve the misery of these people, but who finds himself waging a losing battle against the primitivism and theocratic oppression that have made life a living hell for the common citizenry of the country. She also encounters a seemingly endless group of people who have become dismembered by all the land mines left over from the Afghani war with the Russians. There is one remarkable scene wherein hordes of desperate, one-legged men hobble on crutches across the desert as Red Cross helicopters rain prosthetic limbs down onto the sands below. It is merely one among many images from the film that seer themselves into the viewer's memory. Another is a scene in which a male doctor has to examine his female patients through a hole cut out of a sheet, not even being allowed to talk to the woman directly about her symptoms but having to get his information through a male (or female child) `interpreter.'

Makhmalbaf keeps the ending of the film deliberately ambiguous which might frustrate some viewers but which actually adds to the verisimilitude of the piece. In the same way, much of the acting in the film borders on the amateurish at times, but again that contributes to the pseudo-documentary aura that the film must have to be truly effective. A clear-cut narrative resolution and slick performances by obviously professional actors would likely rob the film of its much-needed sense of immediacy.

`Kandahar,' by providing a voice to so many voiceless people, is a film that cries out to be seen.

If you really want to know, especially if you are a woman, how it was and in many ways probably still is, to live in Afghanistan, you should see this movie. This is truly shocking, without any seen physical violence. But the violence here is anyway bigger than in most "action movies" together.

The plot is about the Afghanian woman who is living in Canada. She has, through un-official ways, heard that her sister, still living i Kandahar, is planning to commit suicide. The Canadian/Afghanian woman tries to reach her sister and Kandahar. But there are obstacles, so to say.

This is like seeing a documentary and you get a real illusion of the terrible Afghan life. It deforms everyone, but it's also clear that it's not only the Taliban regime which is to blame for everything. Poverty deforms people morally. It even deforms the war victims without legs, who tries to cheat in rough ways to get prosthesis, obviously in order to sell them.

This is to be recommended. Definitely not a mainstream film.

Kandahar or Safar e Ghandehar is a film that tells about a journey towards Kandahar, the second largest city of Afghanistan, undertaken by Nafas, a young female journalist who escaped Afghanistan with her family but must return and race against time in an attempt to rescue her sister. Nafas, an Afghani refugee who fled to Canada when the Taliban came to power, receives word in 1999 that her sister will commit suicide at the last solar eclipse of the millennium due to unbearable conditions under the Taliban, both as a woman and as a casualty of a landmine. As the film proceeds, Nafas learns more and more about the hardships women face under the Taliban, and even more so, how years of war have destroyed Afghan society. The film is inspired by the real-life experience of actress Nelofer Pazira, who plays Nafas. In 1989, she fled her homeland of Afghanistan and later received a similar letter not from a sister, but from a long-time friend who wanted to end her life in a similar situation starting her trek from the Iran-Afghanistan border, Nafas disguises herself as the fourth wife of an elderly Afghan man. As Nafas' desperation grows (she has only three days to reach Kandahar before her sister kills herself, on the day of the last solar eclipse of the century), the images grow more and more dreamlike. At one point, Nafas encounters a madrasah, where boys with AK47 rifles intone verses from their holy book as a bearded mullah looks on. Later, with the help of an English-speaking African American doctor, she wanders into a Red Cross relief center for mine victims. Nafas's guide, hidden behind a false beard, points out to her that the only technological progress allowed in the country is weaponry. One healthy man named Sahid continually begs the nurses to let him have a set of legs for his mother -- legs he will no doubt sell on the black market. The doctor guide persuades Sahid, who finally gets a pair of artificial legs, to accompany Nafas in her journey, until they run into a wedding party traveling into Kandahar. Nafas attempts to fit in with the party, but the end of the road is unfortunately near for her. Dressed in burkas, the pair joins a wedding party which is stopped by the Taliban because they are playing musical instruments and singing--forbidden by Afghan law. Her guide is taken away and she is unveiled.Makhmalbaf ominously concludes by showing us Nafas' point of view as she lowers her burkha,literally and powerfully drawing a veil over her fate. Captured, she seems destined to fall into the same kind of life that she hoped to help her sister escape. Interestingly the film begins and ends with that brilliant shot of lowering of the burkha by Nafas, perhaps reminding us of the famous couplet:

"And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started". This shot of the movie, a solar eclipse as seen through the burka's mesh and its blinding effects seem to have irradiated the heroine into a kind of waking stupor. Nafas' journey is long and rambling and may have only taken place in her head. But, as the movie's director Mohsen Makhmalbaf implicitly asks in every scene, what is Afghanistan but a state of mind?

It is filmed documentary-style, but the plot is heavily scripted. Also, the English-language dialogue suffers from flat delivery. The protagonist seems phony; every potentially poignant moment is ruined by her deadpan method of speaking.

Visually, the film is stunning at times, especially when one sees the wedding party march in the desert. The sea of burqas in contrasting colors (such as emerald, black, ochre yellow, peach, white, purple, etc.) is absolutely stunning. There's even surrealism when prosthetic legs for land mine victims at a Red Cross camp parachute to the ground

But the quality of the cinematography is not enough to rescue the flawed direction. The vast open spaces also allow Makhmalbaf and his outstanding cinematographer, Ebrahim Ghafouri, to create a steady flow of stunning images, accompanied by Mohammad Reza Darvishi's intoxicating yet spare score. .

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The plot is not very thoroughly developed. The scenery is beautiful, in a stark way, and the plot is barely enough to keep a viewer dramatically involved, but the point is to learn about life in today's Afghanistan.

The Taliban is gone, but the socio-cultural matrix which gave rise to its existence still flourishes in Afghanistan. It will take a lot more than a few years to heal that wounded country

Writing in The New York Times,A.O.Scott noted that both Kandahar and Abbas Kiarostami's "ABC Africa"(about Ugandan orphans) "contain moment of sublime visual poetry that at once heighten and complicate their humanitarian message". Even though it deals directly with neither war nor terrorist violence, it is an anti war movie with a difference.

The comment on the Indian music is off base - Indian music and DVDs are common in Afghanistan as the local entertainment industry is still recovering from the Taliban.

Bollywood film DVDs are sold in Kabul. Pictures and posters of Indian actresses are popular here. It isn't unusual to hear recorded Sitar music here in Kabul.

Afghan and Indian music was distributed secretly at great risk during the Taliban reign.

There is just not enough Afghan material yet and Afghans love music, even if they don't understand Urdu.

There is a scene in the movie where an instrument is seized by the Taliban before the wedding.

So the soundtrack was completely appropriate for me.

Hopefully we will see a feature film made inside Afghanistan someday. Its a beautiful and fascinating place and holds fascinating stories.

It's a sad statement on America's worldview that it took a horrible tragedy on Sept. 11, 2001, to awaken Americans to the brutality of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Until then, most Americans didn't care about the vicious and ruthless nature of those who governed that country.

Former President Bill Clinton said his one regret during his presidency was that he did nothing while nearly one million people were slaughtered in Rwanda. True. But he should also consider why the U.S., this beacon of democracy, did nothing while the Taliban mistreated women and massacred Afghanis. Even George W. Bush gave the Taliban nary a thought until that horrific day in 2001.

When it was initially released, Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film, "Kandahar," probably had little chance of finding an audience in the U.S. After all, at the time, the majority of Americans wouldn't have been able to find Afghanistan on a map, let alone know where Kandahar was. But then Sept. 11 happened and Kandahar, like Kabul and Spin Boldak, became household words in American homes. U.S. TV networks rushed out experts on Afghanistan and reported on the Taliban's brutality as if they'd uncovered a previously unknown fact.

Of course, all that's changed now. We don't care about Afghanistan anymore. Not after this administration concocted evidence and launched an unjust war against Iraq, gaining support for it by frightening Americans. Paranoia is patriotic. Also, covering the downfall of a barbaric regime that didn't put up a fight isn't as sexy as giving round-the-clock coverage on a pop star accused of child molestation or a yet another rich, young, white woman gone missing in California. Watching "Kandahar," you'll no doubt wonder why we didn't intervene years ago. If this film doesn't make Americans truly appreciate their lives and rights, which they take for granted, nothing will.

The film's inspired by true events. Writer and star Nelofer Pazira, who fled Kabul with her family, tried to enter Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to search for her best friend who stayed behind. Pazira never got beyond the Iranian-Afghan border. But filmmaker Makhmalbaf, whom Pazira had contacted earlier, decided two years later to fictionalize Pazira's story.

I admit I was in two minds after watching "Kandahar." The acting's amateurish - they're all non-actors - and the storytelling is, at times, a bit heavy-handed. I don't know whether it was a good idea to cast Pazira. Her character carries the entire film and it needs someone who can pulls us into her plight. Pazira's narration occasionally gets ponderous. The film relies heavily on that narration to serve as exposition; a good example of tell don't show, when films should be otherwise. Pazira never varies her voice and her monotone can be off-putting. A stronger actress could have done wonders with the role.

However, these flaws could be ignored because of what the film's trying to tell us. Maybe we're too spoiled by professional-looking Hollywood films to appreciate something like this. The film's beautifully shot and contains several wrenching moments. I shan't spoil it for you, but there's an unforgettably potent moment in a Red Cross camp.

"Kandahar" makes a good double feature with Siddiq Barmak's "Osama" (2003). Also, do yourself a great favor - read Khaled Hosseini's powerful novel, "The Kite Runner," a film adaptation of which will be directed by Sam Mendes.

"Kandahar" proves great nations should help oppressed people even if the assistance doesn't fall into the narrow category of national interest. That would be an acceptable reason than scaring an uninformed populace with fake evidence about nonexistent WMDs. "Kandahar" might not look polished, the acting not brilliant. But I'll take this film any day over huge, glossy Hollywood clunkers - "Be Cool" and "Hostage," for instance - showing in theaters right now.

This is an extremely beautiful film which inhabits a visual and emotional territory somewhere between Werner Herzog and Pasolini.

As others have stated, the actors are non-professionals and the plot is not the stuff of Hollywood melodrama. However the images and sounds are haunting and profound. Mahkmalbaf is truly a poet of the cinema.

The film does not attempt to make a political analysis of the situation of Afghanistan in 2001, but operates on a more humanistic and emotional level, showing the human consequences, the poverty both material and spiritual of life under the Taliban and the indifference of the outside world.

The "doctor" character, far from being implausible, is played by a real person with a very similar history. He is also a stand-in within the film for Makhmalbaf himself, who started as an Islamic fundamentalist revolutionary but has moved towards a more open-minded humanism.

The film itself describes a circle, the first scene is also the last, the sun shining through a burqa onto a woman's face. Between are unforgettable images, and a transit across a surreal and nightmarish landscape. Surrender yourself and you will really feel you have been on a journey.

The UK DVD also includes "The Afghan Alphabet" a similarly fictionalised documentary on the struggle to bring education to the three million or so Afghan refugees in Iran.

This movie is not for those brought up on a diet of Hollywood entertaining blockbusters with amazing special effects, thrilling and twisting plots, character development and a satisfying denouement.

Kandahar by an acclaimed Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, carries different layers of meaning, conveyed creatively through an artistic process. The image as a language is more powerful than words can ever convey. He uses "real" people rather than actors to enhance authenticity.

Afghani-Canadian, Nafas, has three days to save her despairing sister from suicide in Kandahar, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, but can't enter it normally because of her journalist credentials. Her only choice is to trek from the Iranian border. Mohsen uses this narrative to capture the horrendous ravages and severe plights of a war-torn country steeped in an oppressive culture for women and shackled by the terrifying ideology of the Taliban. He employs no special effects, no physical violence, no explosions, not a single gunshot, not a single drop of blood - just images of everyday life.

Nafas can't travel as an unaccompanied woman and she must wear the head to toe burqa covering. For us the burqa is a symbol of the woman's oppression, to the Afghani male it's his honor. Women are meant to be largely invisible, so poignantly captured in family photo portraits. A doctor can only examine his female patient through a small hole in a curtain separating the two and communicate indirectly via a third party such as an accompanying child. Girls are removed from schools en masse. "For a woman living under full cover hope is for a day she'll be seen."

The austere landscape reinforces the grinding poverty and the meager means of existence, inevitably giving rise to lawlessness and a survival instinct that grabs every opportunity for financial gain. And there is little chance of escaping this hopelessness as the only aspiration for a boy is to be a mullah, a religious figure, through meaningless rote memorization of the Koran evidenced by repetitions of a mantra venerating the only technology allowed – the AK47 rifle.

The most chilling indictment of the war is the hordes of people with missing limbs blown up by land mines which litter the entire country. The most important currency for these people is the prosthetic limb for which they are entitled only one per year. Everyone, including the able-bodied, needs a pair, just in case. The surrealism of a horde of guys racing on crutches to receive crude prosthetic limbs parachuting down from the sky sears the mind.

The large bridal party adorned in their fluttering multi-colored burqas (supposedly covering only women) trudging across the barren landscape in rhythm to a numbing chant and tribal drumbeat heading towards a wedding in Kandahar conveys a notion of traditional bliss and innocence. That vanishes like a mirage when the party is intercepted at a Taliban checkpoint.

The curious presence of an African American looking for God, but ends up as a "doctor" administering whatever relief he can to basic health issues, is a statement that the core problem in Afghanistan is not religion per se but a dysfunctional country in a state of crippling deprivation of everything.

This movie was released in 2001, a decade after Taliban forces, aided and abetted by the United Sates, defeated the might of the then Soviet Union in their misguided and disastrous attempt to invade Afghanistan. This left the shattered country at the mercy of the extremist ideologically driven Taliban. The United States' response to 9/11 was to invoke a war against terror targeting the same Taliban forces. More bombs and military destruction followed. The country has once again been plunged into unimaginably crippling devastation.

The overarching message of this movie is the carnage and utter futility of war in bringing about desired social outcomes. It would appear Americans have neither learned the lessons of the Vietnam War nor from the Soviet's recent experience. Bombs and other military hardware are useless against an enemy with neither significant infrastructure nor targets to be destroyed. Deploying highly equipped alien boots on the ground is not going to win the hearts and minds of a population devoid of the means of livelihood, scarred by decades of war and lacking the education to escape this quagmire. The entire country becomes an even more fertile ground for breeding and recruiting terrorists – the antithesis of the war's objective. The American effort in Afghanistan is reputed to cost $1 billion each day. Imagine this amount redirected into developing and educating the country instead.

Makhmalbaf makes a pointed reference to the total uselessness of the UN. Its flag, being a symbol of neutrality that was meant to protect the traveling party, ended up planted next to a human skeleton in the desert. The only thing of tokenistic "value" recovered from the skeleton was a bejeweled ring, which ended up being worthless.

All cultural values are in some senses relative. We make criticise, say, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan for forcing women to wear the burka; but our own society enforces different standards with regard to the male and female exposure of the chest. We might therefore say that the burka is oppressive not so much in itself but rather as part of a system that undermines the freedom of women; but this is to assume that in our sexist, and over-sexualised, society, women are in practice freer. In fact, I believe they are; but at some level it is important to acknowledge the arbitrariness of such positions at the deepest level; that they depend on prejudice (to use that word non-prejudicially), on values rather than reason. To argue that because we know nothing for certain we should therefore do nothing, think nothing is a doctrine of futile despair; but to be aware of the limitations of our own thinking, to know that for certain future generations will surely condemn us are clearly as we condemn others, is vital before we consider the values of societies other than our own, a secular equivalent of humility before God.

This is not to say I would like to see a film defending the appalling Taliban. But even the most tyrannical regime is in some regards the product of the society it tyrannises: we are all both prisoners and guards. To understand that regime (and its true horrors), one needs to understand how it worked with, as well as against, the grain of traditional society; and what is good, as well as what is bad, about that. Unfortunately, this is not what we get with 'Kandahar'.

It's a shame, because this film contains the potential material for exploring the ambiguity of life. Its central character is rude, arrogant and ambitious (a journalist travelling to Afghanistan to try and save her sister, she doesn't hesitate to try to try and make a story out of her ordeal at the same time). A returning exile, she might be considered as both having the right to criticise what is happening to her country and also the eyes of one who has seen enough to know what is wrong. But one could just as easily say that she has neither that in fact she has the rights to neither position. There is thus the potential to portray her with great ambivalence; but 'Kandahar' prefers the values of propaganda. So instead she is our witness, our seer and our reliable narrator; and the film is all the weaker for it.

'Kandahar' contains some great footage of a bleak but beautiful country, but at times its limited budget shows. The dialgoue is strange, the second most important character is (bizarrely) an American, and a number of the scenes sit uneasily between documentary and fiction: Michael Winterbottom did something similar in 'In This World', but that film was more convincing, because the agenda of the director was less clumsily imposed on every scene. 'Kandahar' has neither documentary truth or dramatic ambiguity; and seems to view the world with a very Western slant. Perhaps evil is like Schroedinger's cat: something that can be labelled or shown, but not both at the same time. 'Kandahar' prefers to label; but I prefer more subtlety in my films.

I was moved by the beauty brought to a situation of suffering and tragedy. As our protagonist struggles to find her sister, the horrors of postwar Afghanistan are revealed through simple encounters with a variety of people with struggles of their own. The pacing, which may seem tedious to folks used to fast action, allows a lyrical visual beauty to arise where another filmmaker may have shown chaos. In turn, this lyrical beauty creates a stillness where compassion begins and grows. What was distant & abstract becomes close & personal. We're shown a perspective on war that is at once starkly simple and deeply caring.

I also enjoyed the taste of Persian culture. The legacy of Hafiz, Rumi & other great Persian poets flavors the vivid poetics of Makhmalbaf's cinematography, dialog, and plot structure. Quite a taut alternative to our American viewpoint.

'Safar e Ghandehar' is a partly documentary movie telling the journey of a woman throughout Afganistan trying to reach Kandahar where her sister, she still hopes, lives. She records anything she happens to listen so that you feel the horror and the difficulties of life in that country and everything through the main character's voice. In a way it sounds even more terrible. Every time she stops she finds a new guide (being a woman traveling across Afganistan is even more difficult)and this guide helps her to understand aspects of that reality: at the very beginning a man who accepts to declare she is one of his wives and then she knows the others; then a young boy, son of a widow, who has been thrown out of a Korean school; then a self made doctor coming from America, and so on. A spectacle even surreal someway and very impressive. Worth to see.

I was very disappointed with this film. An excellent chance to portray the plight of the Afghan people was partially wasted.

Aside from a few interesting glimpses of the culture of the Afghan refugees, this film has few redeeming qualities. The scenes are contrived, the plot is sparse, and the acting is wooden. The crew would have been much better off filming a true documentary.

A haunting depressing but fascinating film. I used to believe (naively) in the melting pot theory but the melting pot does not exist. Some cultures are so far removed from what we have been brought up to believe in that is is almost impossible to connect with in any shape or form.

I have always believed that each culture should be looked at on its own merits and the Western Christian/Judeao civilisation is not necessarily the answer to it all. But how can anybody find any merit in a society run by someone like the Taliban. Everybody is opressed, the women more than any, but everybody lives a miserable life. There is no compassion, no respect for divergent views. The poverty is so all pervading that survival at the most basic level is all that matters.

The film is not really a coherent narrative, more a series of vignettes showing what life was like under the Taliban. Despite the amateur acting it is a powerful film. A number of powerful images, the most powerful, to me, is the scene depicting how female patients are dealt with by a "doctor". Horrifying. Western society has many many faults but by god I'm glad I live in it.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf's "Safar-e Ghandehar" ("Kandahar" in English) is one of those movies that turned out to be more significant than the people involved in the production assumed that it would be. Even when it got screened at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, most people worldwide had never heard of the Afghan city. But the 9/11 attacks focused everyone's attention on the Central Asian country, and suddenly, cities like Kabul, Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif started appearing on the nightly news.

This Iranian-French co-production makes the Taliban's Afghanistan look like the most miserable place, especially for women. The saddest thing is that the Taliban would've never taken over had the USSR not invaded Afghanistan, prompting the US to back Islamist fighters against the Soviet army. Even with the Taliban out of power, the situation for women in Afghanistan looks as bleak as can be (to say nothing of Afghanistan's narco-economy).

The most interesting thing about this movie is that it shows us people's daily lives in an isolated society. Told from the point of view of an Afghan-Canadian woman looking for her sister, it's a devastating look at the country. I recommend it.

The film does have an almost documentary-like feel to it, that I think is because the main character is a journalist and she is presenting the world of Afghanistan to us. I found the film interesting, as another reviewer has put it, not in its politics but in its anthropology, it had the same fascination as watching a program on the Sky travel channel. The journalists mission, is very understated....the director held back from giving us a full on City of God oppression type of approach, but didn't, and I feel that was deliberately because he wanted us to experience the differences in culture between the Iranians and the Taliban governed Afghan side. He didn't quite pull it off for me, for two reasons....The first is I'm extremely cynical about watching any movie with a political bias, and this definitely has one. The second is, I don't think the central figure had enough charisma......Although thinking about it now, the two may have counterbalanced themselves quite well.... Anyway, it was interesting...so to was the documentary on the DVD, called Afghan alphabet. My concern about politics is illustrated nicely on that, when a young Afghan refugee, is used to show the oppression of the Taliban, because she is scared to remove her Bhurka for fear of sinning.....She is asked repeatedly what her name was, which she repeatedly said she didn't want to divulge and was clearly uncomfortable, and was in my opinion mentally bullied into removing her bhurka, which makes you wonder who is doing the oppressing now!!!

The film Safar e Ghandehar was shown in the U.S. with the title Kandahar (2001). It was written and directed by the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Nelofer Pazira plays Nafas, a woman from Afghanistan who now lives in Canada. She travels to Iran, and then to Afghanistan, to help her sister. (Her sister is terribly depressed, and plans to commit suicide within a few days.)

There's a very grim scene in Iran, when children returning to Afghanistan are taught to avoid picking up dolls, because they may be booby-trapped with explosives. Then Nafas crosses into Afghanistan with a group of returning refugees.

The remainder of the movie--set in Afghanistan--makes the situation in Iran look idyllic. All the women wear the burqa (burka), so that we can't see them, and they have to see the world through a semi-transparent veil.

Lawlessness abounds. Gunmen--I assume they are Taliban--roam the area and operate at will. Most horribly, people with amputated limbs are everywhere. There's a whole culture of amputations and artificial limbs, with more amputations from land mines every day.

Nafas makes her way though this dangerous landscape in what is, in essence, a road movie. Although the people she meets are interesting--and sometimes generous and helpful--the situation is so depressing that it's hard to find any comfort while watching the film.

This movie gives us a snapshot of what it would be like to be a woman--accustomed to living in North American--who has returned to a very different homeland from the one she left. The director is Iranian, so I don't know how authentically the scenes represent Afghanistan. My guess is that they are authentic, and that they portray a sad and horrible truth.

We saw the film on DVD. I think it would work better in a theater. It's a great--if grim--movie, and it's worth seeking out and viewing.

(Note that the director of Kandahar, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, is the director who is impersonated by the protagonist in the Kiarostami movie Close-Up.)

There are people who complaint about lack of plot in this movie. The plot was lives and hopes of people in Afghanistan. Anyone who expects an entertaining story from a semi documentary movie like this has missed the whole point: this movie was made to educate westerners about the suffering of Afghanis and to put a human face on the people who are nothing but statistics in the west. If you want entertainment do not watch this movie!

I loved the exquisite cinematography. Every frame was beautifully composed with a great deal of symbolism and poetry (like the UN flag ending up with the corpse in the desert, a reference to the UN lack of concern for Afghanistan in the past 22 years)!

We westerners react shockingly to this movie and think how a country can be so backward in this day and age; ignoring the fact that our governments had a lot to do with their backwardness.

A poster wrote "There is one remarkable scene wherein hordes of desperate, one-legged men hobble on crutches across the desert as Red Cross helicopters rain prosthetic limbs down onto the sands below". Well, the scene was total B***S***! The Red Cross has worked in Afghanistan for nearly 30 years and for probably half that time has had the world's largest orthopaedic programme. Each and every limb is made to fit for each person and then there are weeks of rehabilitation in one of the many well equipped orthopaedic centres around the country after the limb has been fitted. There is no need to buy and sell them on the black market because they are free of charge to anyone who needs one. Always have been and always will be. There is also no way on earth that the Red Cross ortho programme has ever been run out of tents in the desert and absolutely no way the Red Cross ever dropped double prosthetics out of helicopters or planes. The entire scene is an insult to the Red Cross. And before you howl me down I have been working in Afghanistan and have seen the work done by the Red Cross before, during and after the rule of the Taliban. The writer, producers and directors should be ashamed of themselves.

I came to this movie thinking it would be a documentary--and it is, in a way: it was filmed in what appears to be war-torn Afghanistan, and it includes some genuine news footage. At first, I was confused because "reality" soon gives way to scenes and behavior that could only be called, at best, surreal; at worst, bizarre. The main character, who is also the voice-over narrator, is played by an Afghanistan-born Canadian actress impersonating herself. The rest of the cast, with three exceptions, seem to be Afghanis speaking their native dialects. However, through their gestures, speech rhythms, and of course the subtitles, I would guess they are recently recruited actors. To me, it feels more like classical Greek drama than realism. But that's okay with me: fiction can be truer than fact, to reverse the old cliché. Though flawed, the film is powerful at the emotional level. The cinematography is spectacular. I came out feeling I had a deeper understanding of the tragic history of Afghanistan

I do not know if anyone else over here has realised this or not. Probably, may not be, because most of the people I found here were from either the US or UK or other Westerners.

If you listen to the song which they play once in a while in this movie, it will match the following lyrics:

Thwannaama Keerthana Rathaah Thava Divya Naama Gaayanthi Bhakthi Rasa Paana Prahrushta Chiththaah Daathum Krupaasahitha Darshanamaashu Thebhyah Sri Sathya Sai Bhagawan Thava Suprabhatham

(Meaning in English: Devotees engrossed in singing Thy Glory are happy and blissful, when they taste the nectar of devotion. Kindly shower Thy Grace by granting them Thy Darshan. O Lord Sathya Sai! Blessed by Thy wakefulness, we pray for an auspicious day.)

Aadhaaya Divya Kusumaani Manoharaani Sreepaada Poojana Vidhim Bhavadanghri Mooley Karthum Mahothsukathayaa Pravishanti Bhakthaah Sri Sathya Sai Bhagawan Thava Suprabhatham

(Meaning: Bringing holy flowers with captivating colors and fragrance, for worshipping Thy Lotus Feet, in the form as prescribed by the scriptures, Thy devotees are coming in, with great yearning and enthusiasm. O Lord Sathya Sai! Blessed by Thy wakefulness, we pray for an auspicious day.)

This as you might see is a verse from a song in Sanskrit in praise of a Hindu god! This is not a bloody Afghani song. This does not have any connection to Afghanistan and neither does it make any sense in the situations where it has been used in this movie. This again shows the amateurishness of this movie, apart from the crappy acting, etc. There hasn't been any research done before even attempting to take such a movie and that is quite alarming!

The above song btw is is called Sri Satya Sai Suprbhatham and probably almost every Hindu in India would have heard this song! I do not understand how it did find its way into an Afghani movie!! Couldn't the movie makers apply some common sense b4 stealing a song which they thought would be cool to have in the backdrop???

Nafas is an Afghan refugee in Canada, separated from what remains of her family. When she receives a letter from her sister in Kandahar saying that she intends to kill herself at the next eclipse, Nafas sets out to enter Afghanistan and find her sister in order to rescue her. Joining a family traveling across the desert she quickly remembers why she fled the country in the first place as her status as a woman is as dangerous as the unseen landmines as she tries to find her sister before time runs out.

I knew little about this film prior to watching it apart from that it was popular mostly due to its unfortunate relevance. Watching it from the start to the end I must admit that, as a film or a story it was not as good as some viewers have said. The narrative is simplistic and seems to alter the passing of time to suit itself, while major holes in plotting are rather annoying if that is what you are focusing on. The film also struggles in terms of characters, with Nafas being rather bland and hard to care for, her sister being unseen and not in any more danger than those we do see (ie minimising our passion for the quest) and even the noble Talib Sahid came across as rather an unlikely character to stumble upon.

However, I still consider this to be a film worth seeing even after all that. Why? Well, simply because of the view it gives us of Afghanistan – a view that not even the British media did a good job of giving us when the conflict started. I watched this thinking 'this is the country we have been bombing for several years now?' and, while I knew it was hardly the most technologically advanced country, it doesn't really hit home until you see it and, with US news coverage of this side of the country being limited to hyped-up soldiers then this film should be seen to help balance it all out. So Nafas' journey is little more than an excuse to show many aspects of the country within a sort of story and, as that, it is worth seeing – it is hard not to feel for the people as you see the treatment of women, the poor facilities, the horrors of landmines and so on.

True to the weakness of the plot, the ending just sort of 'happens' and those who had been holding to the hope of the vague narrative becoming stronger will also be let down. This is not a film to come to for a story or a strong plot because in these areas it is pretty weak and not very good as a film as you'd expect one to be. However it provides insight into a country that we have all heard a lot about over the past few years and, for that and that alone, it is valuable and worth seeing if you can get the chance.