Photo Courtesy: Sita Magnuson

Port Moody is hosting the first-ever Afghan Film Festival, presented by the Vancouver Institute for Afghan Studies and Ariana TV, in the city hall Inlet Theatre (see map here, only 45 minutes from downtown on the #160) . Held every night from next Sunday until the following Friday (October 1-6 at 8 pm), the $5 tickets will be available at the door from an hour before the festival.

With films by Latif Ahmad, the director of the Afghan Film Institute and Sadique Barmak, the film festival is up against the Vancouver Film Festival, which has a headstart this Thursday. Hopefully the Lower Mainland Afghan community will support this effort and turn it into an annual event that doesn’t coincide with its bigger cousin to the west. Hopefully too, enough non-Afghan Port Moodyites will make it out to the screenings. It wasn’t advertised on the Port Moody Film Society’s email newsletter, nor on their website, but hopefully thier 1000+ members will support this initiative. I will see if I can sneak in a screening myself, what with my work schedule and an already heavy line-up of VIFF films on my to-see list.

I looked up the films to see what they were about (after the jump, with some editorial levity to alleviate the sombre subject matter of all the films):

Sunday October 1: Migrated Birds
Director: Latif Ahmadi
“[In the 1980s] one brother is killed on his wedding day and the other escapes to Pakistan without upholding the tradition of marrying his brother’s widow. His fiancé in Pakistan, realizing the hopelessness of the situation, resorts to a murder-suicide.” I thought I had headaches planning my wedding.

Monday October 2: The Stoning (short film)
Director: Latif Ahmadi
“Based on a true story about a warlord who rapes the wife of an exiled man resulting in her pregnancy. To keep her shameful secret, the woman goes to her father’s house for the delivery. However there she finds out that the warlord has used his might and is planning a marriage with her 13 year old sister. To prevent his own disgrace and to ensure that the marriage goes ahead, the warlord orders his rape victim stoned for obviously having illegal extra-marital relations.” Bring some prozac.

Monday October 2: Sacrifice (short film)
Director: Humayoun Paiyaz
“A girl living in a mountainous area of Afghanistan loses her mother to sickness and lives with her brother, who is also very sick. The girl finds solace in the friendship with a goat, her only inseparable companion. Based on a tradition of the village, the Mullah decides that there must be a sacrifice to atone for the tragedy of her family and decrees that they must sacrifice the family goat. This final act destroys the girl’s spirit.” If only Hollywood made this film and the girl and the goat escape to New York. Yes, it could almost have been Perfect Strangers.

Tuesday October 3: The Love Story
Director: Latif Ahmadi
“Set in Northern Afghanistan were the traditional game of buzkashi is played, competition is fierce leading to animosity on and off the field. Oblivious to their fathers’ rivalry, the children of the two top opponents fall in love. Faced with either losing their children or having to reconcile their differences the opponents choose to resolve the issue during a game of buzkashi. In order to win the hand of his love, the son is recruited to play against his father while his fiancé looks on. The father, unwilling to compromise victory pays a tragic price.”

Note: Buzkashi is a soccer-type sport, only there’s a headless goat or calf carcass instead of a ball. One game can last a week. From the Wikipedia entry:

“The calf in a buzkashi game is normally beheaded, disemboweled and its limbs cut off from the knee, then soaked in cold water for 24 hours before play to toughen it. Occasionally sand is packed into the carcass to give it extra weight….Though goats are used when no calf is available, calves are less likely to fall apart during the game.”

There was a buzkashi game in Rambo III and in current Afghan lit critics’ darling, The Kite Runner.

Wednesday October 4: The Stranger (short film)
Director: Sadique Barmak
When copyright is violated: “A tragic tale about a farmer and his wife who work on a large property owned by a land baron. The wife is renowned for her beautiful singing voice. One day the land baron forces her to sing for a visiting foreigner and unbeknownst to her, he captures her voice on tape. In the evening the farmer observes the land baron listening to the recording and believes it must be his wife in a compromising situation. Anger and revenge drive the farmer to take matters into his own hands.”

Wednesday October 4: Gulchaihrah (short film)
Director: Sayed Wahidullah Qathalie
“This film highlights the struggle for woman’s rights in Afghanistan and depicts the oppression from forced marriages. It features the story of an underage girl, Gulchaihrah, who is forced to marry a man in his sixties and in her desperation tries to escape her fate with tragic consequences.” Hopefully one day we can get some mindless drivel out of the Afghan film industry. No wonder Titanic was the biggest thing in pre-9/11 Afghanistan.

Thursday October 5: Kabul Cinema (short film)
Director: Mirwas Rekab
“One of the victims of the Islmaist fundamentalist rule has been the film industry itself. A fire was deliberately set at the Kabul Cinema but a young boy’s determination to rescue films and equipment leads to a unique way of keeping film alive on the streets of Kabul. His entrepreneurial spirit gets him into trouble with the fundamentalists who teach him a humiliating lesson.” A Central Asian Cinema Paradiso?

Thursday October 5: Shabnum
Director: Mohammad Haideri
“A girl, Shabnum, loses everything she cherishes and only has her dream of attending school left. She is determined to attend school like other boys and girls but the superintendent won’t find room for her. Shabnum, homeless and alone, won’t lose sight of her dream.” This film will be as cheerful as the Afghan Film Festival will get.

Friday October 6: Akhtar the Joker
Director: Latif Ahmadi
“Akhtar, a young person from the oppressed class of society, [has] all his life tried to solve his problems by getting close to a rich family. His attempts result in one family hiring him as an entertainer. To complicate matters he falls in love with the beautiful daughter who has just returned from overseas. Akhtar thinks his plans to marry her will lead to accessing her family fortune but the family quickly realizes his plan resulting in his dismissal and leading to tragic consequences.” He should have set his sights on Gulchaihrah instead.