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Surreal Trek of A Pilgrim
KANDAHAR:Powerful but flawed tale of a "pilgrim's progress" from Iran to Afghanistan.
The New York Post, December 14, 2001
By JONATHAN FOREMAN

The latest film by celebrated Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf depicts a slightly ficitionalized episode in the real life of its star, Nelofa Pazira, a Canadian journalist raised in Afghanistan, who went back to the Taliban-controlled country to rescue a suicidal friend.

Pazira plays Nefas, the journalist who tries to get from Iran to Kandahar to rescue not a friend but a suicidal sister who has been maimed by a land mine.

Nefas narrates her own story, talking in English into a little tape recorder as the camera watches her don a burka and pay a returning refugee to pretend she is one of his wives.

Unfortunately, you are often distractingly aware that you are watching re-enactments of real events.

This is partly because Makhmalbaf chooses to shoot some of the scenes in a pseudo-documentary style, and partly because the film was made for a tiny budget (in a small town on the Iran-Pakistan border) using non-professional actors speaking improvised dialogue that is rarely convincing.

But despite the self-consciousness and occasional crudeness of the exercise, there is often a visceral intimacy to Makhmalbaf's depiction of the cruel, medieval oppressiveness of Taliban rule - even for viewers who have become familiar with Afghanistan's physical and cultural landscape since the beginning of the recent war.

There are also scenes that are so surreal that they could be something out a Monty Python comedy if they weren't so horribly plausible - including one which shows dozens of (genuinely) one-legged men racing on crutches for pairs of artificial legs dropped by parachute.