Movie about Afghan refugees...

haven · Oct 7, 2001

I just took this review off the Onion. No clue if this movie will be readily accessible at any point in the US, but with all the interest on the topic for obvious reasons, I figured I'd pass it along.

Baran
In the media crash course on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden, Americans have been given
relatively few opportunities to distinguish them from the Afghan people; perhaps as a primer
for war, all have been grouped under the broad heading "Afghanistan." On the week of Sept.
11, three new Iranian films about the plight of Afghan refugees (Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The
Sun Behind The Moon, Abolfazl Jalili's Delbaran, and Majid Majidi's Baran) premièred at the
Toronto Film Festival, just in time to offer images of their unending poverty and oppression.
Though made with a compassionate eye and undeniable skill, Majidi's Baran is still a
disappointment, partly because it never quite quenches this new thirst for information.
Opening with a long statement about the 1.4 million Afghanis who fled to Iran after the
Soviets invaded their country in 1979, the film reneges on its initial promise to show the
sharp ethnic divide between illegal refugees and native Iranians in the workplace. In spite of
Majidi's reputation for prodding sentiment—in some circles, he's been pejoratively labeled
"Iran's Steven Spielberg"—the early scenes take a hard look at the volatile imbalance of
laborers at an urban construction site. Working longer hours for less money than their Iranian
counterparts, Afghans are paid under the table and forced to scatter whenever government
inspectors make one of their frequent surprise visits. Their tenuous hold on even a meager
livelihood become painfully clear when an old Afghani, the sole breadwinner in a family with
five children, breaks his foot while on the job. After a lot of cajoling, he persuades his boss
(Mohammad Amir Naji) to hire his young son (Zahra Bahrami) in his place, but it soon becomes
clear that the boy is too weak to haul around the heavy cement bags. When Bahrami is
shifted over to "women's work," serving the other men lunch and tea, he excels at his job but
attracts the resentment of Hossein Abedini, a hotheaded Iranian teen who used to hold the
position. As Abedini begins to soften toward Bahrami, courtesy of a "secret" that's more than
a little predictable, so does the movie, which begins smoothing out its political edge with
flavorless melodrama and precious, overwrought visual poetics. Analogous in many ways to
Hollywood films that look at the black experience through the eyes of self-hating white men,
Abedini's awakening to Afghan strife emphasizes the wrong side of the story. Only in the final
scene, made all the more ironic and powerful by current events, does the tragedy of Afghan
refugees finally register. —Scott Tobias
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Movie about Afghan refugees...

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