Afghanistan

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It was her eyes that caught Sedigh Barmak's attention. The 40-year-old director of Osama, one of two Cannes entries about Afghanistan, needed the right girl to play his lead. Barmak was seeking someone with whom Afghans could identify, someone who would make his audience "feel confident about themselves, to prove to them that they are human again." He combed Kabul's schools and orphanages in vain. Then came a chance street encounter. A young girl in a tattered salwar kameez approached him, begging for money. "Her eyes," says Barmak, "were like an explosion of light." Marina Golbahari had never acted before, but she didn't need to reach deep for the emotions Barmak wanted her to reveal onscreen. "He asked what made me sad," says the 13-year-old about the day they met. "I thought about my sisters who died during the war, and I just started crying." When he offered her the role, she assumed he was joking. "I just thought he was trying to make me feel better."

Barmak found his star, and, in Barmak, the Afghan movie industry may have discovered its savior. Osama is the first Afghan feature film to be made in Afghanistan since the Taliban rolled into Kabul in 1996, torching theaters, shutting down Barmak's studio and burning thousands of reels of film. "It was like they were burning a human body," he says. "I was beyond depression."

Movies have always stirred intense emotions in Barmak. "The first time I went to see a movie was with my father. I saw a line of light from a very small hole fill the entire screen. I had to know what was behind the light." When the projectionist was out on a cigarette break, Barmak grabbed his chance and ducked into the projection room. From that moment on, he knew he had to make films. "It was not only a dream," he recalls. "It was a crazy moment of love."

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Barmak started by gathering scraps of discarded filmstrip from the garbage bins of movie theaters, taping them together and putting on screenings for his friends. "I even charged them," he chuckles. His passion earned him a scholarship to Moscow's prestigious All-Union State Cinema Institute in 1981 (Afghanistan was then under Soviet control), and a decade later he landed the directorship of the government-run Afghan Film Studio in Kabul. When the Taliban took the city, Barmak fled to the north, where he made documentaries for the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was later assassinated by al-Qaeda. Next he escaped to Pakistan, where he starred in a radio soap opera for Afghan refugees. His moviemaker friends from the studio weren't so lucky. Barmak returned to Kabul after the fall of the Taliban, to find his former partners broken and dispirited. "I had to find a way to rehabilitate them," he says. "They didn't feel like they were filmmakers anymore."

In the shambles of his old studio, Barmak brought together his old colleagues to create educational films—about health, about land mines, about rebuilding the country. "So much of Afghanistan is illiterate," says Barmak. "The only way to teach people is through movies." Most of the venues suitable for screening films had been destroyed, so he took his movies on the road. He dispatched eight teams of projectionists around the country in what he calls cinema caravans—cars loaded with video projectors, amplifiers and screens—which stopped in every town to show not only the educational films but also old classics such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton reels. The outdoor screenings were a hit, and the projectionists stayed up late into the nights, showing the movies over and over. "My people have been waiting such a long time to laugh after so much suffering and tragedy," says Barmak. "Our technical guys cried. It was the first time they had seen people laugh in years."

Like many Afghan returnees, Barmak has faith in his people's ability to rebuild the country. But as with Osama, which was produced with funding from Ireland, Iran and Japan, he knows they will need a lot of help. Movies, he says, will play their part: "They can give Afghans a mirror with which to restore their sense of identity." In a way, Barmak has already achieved that for his people. When he shows Osama on his next mobile-cinema sortie, he might just inspire a whole new generation of filmmakers. In a land where darkness reigned for so long, he has never stopped following cinema's line of light.