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Osama: Taliban Afghanistan
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As you might expect from this sad story, "Osama" is a harsh chronicle of life under the oppressive rule of the Taliban through the eyes of an innocent girl. She is made to face the unflinching way the new rulers will put down any question to their authority and is terrified enough as a young girl. But, when she is forced to pose as a boy the terror increases tenfold and she lives in mortal fear every minute.
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The winner of the Golden Globe for Best Foreign-Language Film, Osama is a heartbreaking depiction of life under the brutal Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Filmed over the course of year, this spare and artfully told drama from Siddiq Barmak has a gritty authenticity reminiscent of the Italian neo-realist films of Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief) and Roberto Rossellini (Open City). MORE»
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Osama is ... an important picture historically. It's the first time that somebody like Barmak could make a picture like this, and it gives a glimpse into the lives of women under the oppressive Taliban regime. Yes, Barmak is biased against the Taliban, but with their draconian ways of punishing women, it is hard not to be. Filmwise, it is similar to many of the films coming out of neighboring Iran. Thematically, many of these films look at the plight of women. Barmak uses a cast of non-actors, here to surprising effect.
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Director-writer Siddiq Barmak's "Osama" won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. Barmak is an Afghan filmmaker trained in Moscow in the 1980's and influenced in the 1990's by Iranian cinema and by his mentor Mohsen Makhmalbaf. He takes a sledge-hammer approach to the material by stripping the story of any subtlety or sentimentality. That leaves a simple but most effective portrait of the Taliban's cruelty. It lays out the bleakest of prospects for the Afghani citizens under such an oppressive and misogynistic regime, in a film that is so straightforward and honest and unbearable to comprehend in its depiction of cruelty. There's a special sense of poetical beauty in the unrelenting suffering the filmmaker presents in such a devastatingly no-nonsense and tough-minded way.
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Osama has been involved in establishing 2 very important organizations, MAK (Maktabu l-khidamat) in 1979 and Al-Qa'ida in 1988. While the purpose of these two were different — MAK was built to drive the Soviet troops out of Afghanistan — they are linked in the sense that Al-Qa'ida would never have come were it not for MAK.
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Eventually, in a drive to collect soldiers, the local boys, including Osama, are taken from their homes or work by the Taliban to be trained as soldiers. At the training school, they are taught how to fight and conduct ablutions, and Osama realizes it can only be so long before she is found out. Several of the boys begin to pick on her, and eventually her secret is outed in one of the movie's most vicious and disturbing scenes. Arrested, she is put on trial, and as this case is without precedent, her life is spared when she is given in marriage to a man who delivered a videotape filmed by a western journalist who is ... being tried. The new husband already has three wives, all of whom hate him and say that he destroyed their lives, and they take pity on her.
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Taliban Afghanistan