To mark 8th March, International Women’s Day, it was allocated to the screening of “Playing the Taar”, a film made by Roya Sadat, filmmaker and director.
The meeting was held at the all of the School of Economics of KabulUniversity on 11th March 2010 and was attended by about 800 educators, students, filmmakers, media activists and government authorities.
Rooholamin Amini, moderator and representative of Armanshahr Foundation, opened the meeting by reciting a verse: “Here is me, a lonely women on the eve of a cold season.” Subsequently, Mr. Hosseinzadeh, dean of the Drama Department of Kabul University, and Mr. Javanshir Haydari, President of Filmmakers Union of Afghanistan, briefly offered their congratulations for the International Women’s Day and to Roya Sadat for making the film. Then, the moderator recited a poem from Bidel Dehlavi and called on the audience to watch the film.
“Playing the Taar” is the second feature film of Ms. Sadat. Beside her first feature film, “Three Points”, she has made two joint documentaries and two TV series. Roya Sadat is a graduate of Law and Political Science from HeratUniversity, but she is a full-time filmmaker now.
Playing the Taar is the story of a Turkmen girl called Ay-Nabat at some remote part of Afghanistan, whose father is forced to marry her to one of his co-villagers to compesnate for unintentionally shedding the blood of the latter’s son.
Ay-Nabat’s husband, Mokhtar, has already been married four times and all his first four wives live with him. The bitter fate of Ay-Nabat, her falling in love and submission to a fully forced marriage, her giving birth to a child, and the director’s symbolic treatment of those issues make up the 45-minute film. Editor of the film was Amir Tavakkoli and its music was composed by Massoud Hassanzadeh.
After the screening of the film, Ms. Sadat narrated the problems she had faced during its shooting, problems a woman, and in particular a female filmmaker using such a theme, faces in a patriarchal society.
Seddiq Barmak, the award winning filmmaker, was the first person to comment on the film at the roundtable of critics. He said: This film reminded me of Parajanov’s films, such as The Colour of Pomegranates and Ashik Kerib. Those films had poetic themes and Parajanov was the founder of poetic cinema in the Soviet Union. Mr. Barmak reminded that there are traces of those two films in Roya Sadat’s work and said: In my opinion, there is a positive aspect to this and I take it as a good omen that somebody should pursue a poetic style in the Afghan cinema.
Mr. Barmak said it was difficult to get involved in the field of poetic cinema, because you occasionally feel you don’t need an event, don’t need to dissect it and the characters; you occasionally think of making long, beautiful shots of natural scenery and sometimes the setting of different items intended to create a form leads you to a specific sense. I believe, we need the confrontation of humans, confrontation of items, and confrontation of humans with their periphery and vice versa.
He argued that there is some incoherence at the beginning of the film. Some times, this kind of start disrupts the style and the poetic narration, because it leads you to a style of suspense and such films that pose questions to you, but they sever the relationship that they should establish with the viewer. Unfortunately, the viewer is rather confused in the first 10-15 minutes. That was one of the shortcomings of the script in my opinion. Some of the cuts at the beginning of the film should have been rather slow and latent, in contrast to the film’s style, but they were joined quickly. That puzzles the viewer to some extent, but then you comprehend the story gradually and go along with it.
Mr. Barmak said the general idea of the film was important: Benefiting from her beautiful outlook and very poetic mind, Roya has developed the idea and taken us with her to the last minute. To Mr. Barmak, one of the most important problems of the Afghan cinema is the inconsistency of style throughout the films.
Eng. Latif, director of Afghan Film and a veteran film director, was the second speaker. He was of the opinion that the film script was broken from the beginning, because it didn’t start where it should have. But in his view, that was a director’s right to break and join scenes; the question is how much beauty there is in joining, how careful it has been done and how artfully those pieces have been joined to offer us an acceptable spirit. He said: There are very beautiful scenes in the film from a director’s viewpoint, but, as Mr. Barmak said, if they had been joined along a line they would have been doubly beautiful.
Eng. Latif said the symbols in the films had occasionally been used very carefully, but on other occasions they were meaningful only to the director: A director may think that everybody would understand the meaning of a symbol if it were used, but it creates questions for some people and some others keep silent about it. That is why this film needs its own specific viewers. For example, in a very beautiful and cinematic scene at the beginning, Roya tied the veils of a number of girls of the same age to one another. This is a symbol of the society, a symbol of a shared destiny, but for an ordinary viewer it is only a very beautiful line of girls with tied veils who pass by. I believe such symbols had been used very precisely and properly.
Ms. Shakila, the famous actress, spoke briefly about several decades of work in theatre and cinema. Mr. Sami Nabipour, professor of KabulUniversity, praised the film and said its use of symbols was brilliant.
Drs. Alema, representative of the Women’s 50% Campaign, praised the theme of the film that dealt with the problems of women in Afghanistan. She went on to elaborate on the 50% Campaign from the start to this date. She reminded that the Campaign had been launched on the eve of the Presidential Election to offer suggestions to the candidates, and had collected 11,000 signatures from the people in different parts of Afghanistan. She called on the participants to read the demands of Afghanistan women to the president and join the Campaign if they agreed with those demands.
Domestic and international media that covered the meeting included Tolou TV, Nur TV, VOA TV, daily 8 Sobh, and daily Mandegar.
Invitation
