Courage under fire.

Osama  (Siddiq Barmak, 2003)

From the start filmmaker Siddiq Barmak knew he was dealing with miracles to pull this landmark of a film through. It’s not just the fact that Osama, a great film to encapsulate the end of the Taliban regime, is the first film to be released after the theocratic reign of Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan, everything required to accomplish this great feat is made up of small miracles foremost of which is finding the girl to play the lead role. From a mere coincidence, it pays off – our hearts broke with the young girls unfortunate story, which happens to be real, and real for countless women who up to now live in patriarchal fear.

The young girl (Marina Golbahari) who remained unnamed except for the adopted pseudonym of the infamous Al-Qaeda leader christened to her is portrayed with such efficiency and painstaking resonance that every time we see her in misfortune’s way, we can’t help but want to pluck her out of the screen away from such hapless situations. We first see her amidst a women’s rally which moments after was violently dispersed, some women captured and beaten. Because the men in the family died during the war, her mother thought of a very dangerous ploy – for the girl to disguise as a boy to be able to work and bring food to the famished family. While the grandma tells her a mythical story of a young boy who looked like a girl, she just silently wept as her long hair was being cut off. This will start her harrowing journey into the cruel hands of men and society.

She is forcibly thrown into the rigors of work and the constant jeers from fellow kids who always kid her of her “girlish” appearance – referred in the movie as “nymph”, a boy who looks like a girl similar to the oft-repeated story of her grandma. One of the elder Taliban picks her to be among the ranks of younger generation who will be taught of Taliban fundamentals. Here, she finds herself in more uncompromising and dangerous situations – a public demonstration of how to properly wash the male genitalia in the observance of moral cleansing and being told to climb a dead tree at-the-spur-of-the-moment to prove her “masculinity”.

When punished of this doing, it is here that her disguise is discovered when she had her first menstrual period. The act of public humiliation is so severe and inescapable, not even her protector Esmandi could shield her from the throng of young boys and elders running after her. When she is eventually caught, she is brashly cloaked in the traditional veil which reveals nothing of a woman’s features. She is offered to a public hearing (previously an American journalist was summarily executed after found guilty), is pardoned but “earned” by an old mullah.

The concluding scenes in Osama need not be pronounced to be heartbreaking – after deflowering the girl, the old mullah submerges himself in hot water in the supposed cleansing ritual. Osama is filled with singular scenes that are full of wonder, and Mr. Barmak is a humble genius, culturally significant and poignant in its serenity and simplicity – the planting of the cut hair and the IV leftover from a rundown hospital supposedly watering it, the lyrical melding of the hair-cutting with the storytelling, and other equally brilliant scenes.

True, this is a story of one very unlucky girl but it is also a testament of courage, the immediacy to break the barriers of crooked beliefs and fanaticism, to rise up to the challenge of the times. And Barmak’s film is founded on courage too. After being in exile during the Taliban regime, he found means to be able to tell this meaningful story, not just to his countrymen (who were in indescribable fits of joy upon showing of the first films to come in a long time) but to remind as well the rest of the world of these unsung struggles.