Well, I am a little disappointed that I don’t seem to have anything to talk about other than movies from the Arab and Muslim world, but I happened to watch two interesting films in the last few weeks that address gender in Muslim/Afghan society: Baran and Osama.
Both films are about Afghan women who are forced to dress as men in order to find work when their families are left with no other source of income. They do this for dramatically different reasons and in very different societies. Baran takes place in Iran, while Osama takes place in Afghanistan during Taliban rule. Between the two, I liked Baran a lot more, mostly because the characters have much more personality than those in Osama.
Also, the director from Osama brilliantly manages to depict religious men as perverts, which was just disturbing and not at all what I consider entertainment. Osama’s director also seems to (justifiably) have an axe to grind with the religious leaders of his homeland, which leads to a storyline that is just depressing for a Muslim. The result is certainly important cinema, but its difficult to stomach statutory rape, cruel and unusual punishment and total gender-apartheid (all in the name of Islam) in one film.
Baran is essentially a love story, with all the wonderful modesty, innocence and simplicity that comes with Iranian cinema. Basically, a young Afghan refugee girl in Iran is forced to work at a construction site as a man after her father suffers a work-related injury and is bed-ridden. Unlike Osama, Baran does not explicitly address why a girl would have to pose as a man in order to find work. It is simply assumed that only men can work at construction sites, which is certainly usually the case across the world. Those unfamiliar with Afghan culture are not subjected to a dramatic and painful rant about how much it sucks to be a woman in a destitute, conservative Muslim refugee community. Baran, posing as Rahmat (a boy), is merely trying to fill the position of her father at the male-only construction site. The daughter in Osama works because her mother and grandmother are barred from working under the Taliban. She went to work for her family’s survival, even though her mother is a doctor. Later in Baran, there are scenes that show women working at hard labor as women, which helps those without context to understand that women can certainly work in Iran. Anyway, I am tired of writing…
I feel like I’m just recounting the films. I’ll write again if there’s anything to say.
Basically I’d recommend Baran to everyone and Osama to those who have a familiarity with the history of Afghanistan in order to see this rendition of life under the Taliban. Osama is particuarly depressing for Muslims because it jam-packs all the bad things that could happen to a family in the name of Islam during the Taliban into one feature-length film… so be forewarned!
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