REVIEW BY SARAH STEPHEN
Osama
Writeen and directed by Siddiq Barmak
Distributed by Sharmill Films
With Marina Golbahari, Arif Herati, Zubaida Sahar
Showing in Sydney from April 29 at the Chauvel, Hayden Orpheum Cremorne and Valhalla Cinemas
Osama takes its audience deep into the heart of Afghanistan under the Taliban so effectively I felt more like a participant than an observer. By the end, I was left with a chilling sense of horror.
Osama
Marina Golbahari, who plays the main character — a young woman who disguises herself as a boy to help feed her family — gives a powerful and moving performance. Her mother, a doctor at the local hospital, is forbidden to continue working. Having lost her husband and brother, the family has no means of survival. With the encouragement of the young woman's grandmother, her mother decides to cut her hair, dress her as a boy and send her out to work.
The audience shares her ever-present fear of being discovered as she starts work in a small shop, and is forced to participate with other boys in one of the Taliban's religious schools. After avoiding detection with the help of friend Espandi (who names her Osama) the Taliban finally discovers that she is a girl and she is put in jail. The Taliban's judicial court, which advocates stoning and execution, forces the girl to marry an old mullah, who had noticed her at a military camp.
To cast the main character, the film's creators looked in schools, orphanages, street-children centres and refugee camps, but had difficulty finding female actors. They selected the majority of their actors from refugee camps, but they found Marina Golbahari on the street. She was born in Golbahar (part of Parwan province) in the north of Kabul in 1991, one of 13 members of a very poor family.
Explaining the source of the idea for the film, director Siddiq Barmak explained: "I read a letter from an old senior Afghan teacher that told a story about a little girl who had a burning desire to attend school during the Taliban regime, while it was forbidden for girls. So she changes her appearance to look like a boy by cutting her hair and wearing the boys' outfits."
According to Barmak, Osama "is the story about being scared, where people are afraid of even the sounds of the shadows. It is a story about the permanent and endless stories of women in prison. And it is the story about a little girl and all the injustice and religious nonsense that is being carried on her shoulders."
Perhaps the saddest thing to reflect on, two years after the film was made, is that so little has changed for the majority of Afghan women. Most continue to feel unsafe in public without wearing head-to-toe burqas. Religious police in Herat haul women and girls to hospitals for gynecological examinations for the purpose of "chastity checks".
"Outside the capital, Kabul, and large once-cosmopolitan cities like Mazar-i-Sharif, parents continue to sell their daughters to future husbands, women are not allowed to run shops and when they go to a restaurant, they must eat separately from men", reported the San Francisco Chronicle. "Even in Kabul, where women travel by car more than by donkey, they are more likely to squat in the trunk than to sit comfortably inside the car like men."
From Green Left Weekly, April 21, 2004.
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