Documentary Focuses on the Education of Refugee Children
April 6, 2002
The Frontier Post

RALEIGH (Agencies): On her first day of school, Samira learned the two-letter Farsi word for “water.” To do so, she had to defy her country’s religious
leader and her own strict upbringing. She’s maybe 10 years old.

Samira’s story is told in Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s new film, “Afghan Alphabet,” which had its American premiere Thursday at the fifth
annual DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina.

In October, while bombs and the Taliban regime were falling in Afghanistan, Makhmalbaf who directed last year’s acclaimed “Kandahar” - took his camera
inside classrooms for Afghan refugee children in Iran.

He recorded their struggle to reconcile the strictures of their society with their desire to learn.

DoubleTake is one of several qualifying festivals for documentary shorts for the Academy Awards , organizers said. This year, submissions topped 630.
One-hundred films were selected to be shown, 67 of them competing for prizes.

“Seeing that film was one of the reasons I went after `Afghan Alphabet,’” said Nancy Buirski, executive director of DoubleTake.

“It’s in a fictional narrative framework, but virtually a documentary.” “Kandahar” used real people as actors to tell the story of an Afghan woman who decides to commit suicide because of conditions under the Taliban, and of her sister who travels from Canada to try to stop her.

Concern about women’s place in Islamic societies has been a theme of Makhmalbaf’s films. His daughters, Samira and Hanna, were the assistant directors of “Afghan Alphabet.” The film focuses on the plight of Afghan refugees, who have been fleeing to Iran for nearly two decades.

The filmmaker’s camera found children suffering from the effects of war and the strict rule of the Taliban’s Islamic theocracy. Some had lost limbs to land mines.

There were boys who could chant text but not read, and girls who were afraid to show their faces. The movie focuses on the little girl Samira, whose late father was a mullah, or religious leader.

On the first day of class at a school set up by UNICEF , she stands before the other students, already in trouble. Covered with a black burqa, she insists she can see the blackboard and write
in her workbook. But the teacher wants to see Samira’s eyes, to read either comprehension or confusion.

After polite demands and assurances, and a trick in which she requires the students to wash their faces in a “life skills lesson,” the teacher persuades all the girls to unveil at least to the bridge of the nose - except Samira.

In a calm voice, her slippered feet nervously kneading the floor, Samira says that Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader, taught that the prophet Muhammad kept his wife in a box.

Makhmalbaf couldn’t be reached by telephone this week because he was scouting locations for his next film.

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