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PostPosted: Sat May 17, 2003 3:15 am 
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Seeing Kandahar in Taliban Days
By PEER M. NICHOLS



Mohammad Reza Sharifinia
A scene from "Kandahar," by the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.












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s always, New Yorker Video is filling its niche with interesting releases. Last month there was Jean Vigo's film "L'Atalante" (1934). "May be the greatest film of all time," reads a critic's assessment on the front of the DVD.

Probably not, but Vigo's richly stylized black-and-white tale of a bargeman (Jean Dast) who temporarily loses his new wife (Dita Parlo) to the allure of Paris "is a very great movie," Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times when he saw a restored version at the New York Film Festival in 1990.

Editing all but destroyed the film in Vigo's day. (He died at 29 in the year it was released.) But now another version, restored in 2001, "aims to be as faithful to the original as possible," say the notes on the back of the DVD.

This week New Yorker released "Kandahar," a curious film indeed about Afghanistan under the Taliban. Made by the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf long before 9/11, it stars a real Canadian television journalist named Nelofer Pazira, who plays a fictional Canadian journalist named Nafas who returns to her native Afghanistan.

Nafas is on a mission to find her troubled sister in Kandahar, the Taliban capital, before she commits suicide. The journey proceeds through starkly beautiful desert, and the images are startling. In a land so heavily mined that everyone seems to have a stump or two, entire camps are full of men pacing the sand on crutches waiting to gather prosthetic limbs as they float down by parachute. The curious part is that this is a fictional film that plays as if it would prefer to be a documentary. Ms. Pazira and her family moved from Kabul to Moncton, New Brunswick, and she learned English, went to college and became a journalist. Acting apparently was not part of her curriculum.

Ms. Pazira seems a better narrator than a fictional interloper concealing her presence from the Taliban. Often when she emerges from under her shroud, she leaves the impression that she would be far happier simply describing what she sees rather than carrying on with wooden dramatics.

"Kandahar" had a theater run, but as with other New Yorker releases, most viewers will catch up with the film on video. The company is an arm of New Yorker Films, founded by Dan Talbot, who also owns the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, where "Kandahar" played after 9/11.

"We cherry-pick American art-house and foreign films," said Brian Brown, a vice president of New Yorker Video.


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