Osama is a fairly grim portryal of life under the Taliban. Like The Pianist, Osama shows how religious fundamentalism ruins the entire aspects of life and how it deprives citizens of their basic rights and daily life pleasures. The The film tells the tragic tale of a destitute widow tempting fate by sending her 12-year-old daughter to make a living, ignoring the terrible consequences.
The little girl, now called Osama, undergoes a horrible time as she struggles to hide her female identity from the Taliban to avoid severe punishment.
Zobaida, 38, has lost all her male family memebers over the long years of war, including her husband. She worked as a nurse at a local hospital, but she can not work now as the Taliban totally banned women from working outside home. Life becomes appallingly difficult for Zobaida, as she has no income source to feed her two young children and widowed grandmother.
So finally the grandmother comes up with an idea for survival. She asks Golbahari to cut her hair short and dress up like boys and find a job to earn a living for the family.
“If the Taliban realise I am a girl, they will defintely kill me,” says the little girl filled with fear and hesitation. “If you do not work, we all will die,” says the grandmother in an attempt to encourage the girl.
Golbahari, now named Osama, finds a job at a local shop quite soon. The idea helps the poor family to scrap a living for a while, but they can not fight the destiny.
Everything turns into a nightmare when the Taliban begin rounding up young people from streets for military training and religious indoctrination. Osama is also drafted into an army training school.
Here begins the most tragic scenes of the film. Osama faces a hard time in the training camp and offen harrased and bullied by other school boys, because of her feministic characteristics.
Despite all intolerable harassment and hardship, she has to conceal her female identity to avoid terrible punishment, perhaps a death penalty.
The film is directed by Seddiq Barmak, a professional Afghan filmmaker with a degree in Arts from Russia in 1980s. Most of the key characters of the film are non-professional Afghans.
Even the protagonist, Marina Gulbahari, was hired from an orphanage. Marina’s natural performance with a face full of gloomy emotion and sad feeling adds make the film resemble a documentary.
What makes the film a masterpiece is its simple but truthfully tragic story. Although the story of the film is confined to story of a single family suffering under the Taleban - just a tip of the iceberg - it depicts the real image of life under the oppressive Taliban regime.
It demonstrates that the women were denied of all basic rights under the Taliban, and that they preferred to die rather than to live such a horrible life. “Wish God had never created women,” says the desperate mother with extreme grief and pessimism.
In many cases, the natural scenes of the film make it resemble a documentary. No brave heart can stand not shedding tears seeing a little girl fighting for her life and being mercilessly brutalized by savage extremists.
Osama is an unbearably sad story, beautifully turned into a documentary-like film. Although some critics have underscored several imperfections of the film, the award-winning movie is doubtlessly a brilliant start to rebuild the shattered Afghan film industry and cultural heritage.
4 comments:
I'd love to see that film. Do you have it? I cannot imagine what it was like living under the rule of the Talibans. I've read a book by a Norwegian author (Aasne Seierstad), who lived with an Afghan family in Kabul for a year after the Taliban dictatorship fell. It was really interesting.
The film with subtitles in English is available in the university library. I strongly recommend that you see it. Although some scenes are exaggerated, it gives an idea of how miserably women were living under the Taliban.
Unfortunately, I can't locate a copy of the movie here in the USA. I think it would be warmly received, and show a side of life that many do not realize exists. The 'armchair politicians' of this country (those voters who have the loudest opinions, but never seem able to get off their duffs to actually do something good in the world) might just be shocked at how horrible conditions abroad are.
People are often blinded by political issues... they sometimes forget that we are all a part of humanity, and each person, no matter their background or culture, is unique and has potential.
I saw this movie last year. Tragic indeed and by the end I was screaming in fury. The public library had a copy on hand for rental. If you can't find a copy in stores and your local library offers videos for rent or checkout, ask if they have a copy. The film is worth seeing, not only is it tragic, it's haunting.
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