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Osama wins Hollywood's
hearts and minds
By Andrea
Boyle
PRAGUE - It was the talk of Montreal,
London and Cannes - a name that usually induces feelings
of fear and hatred - Osama.
Yet at those cities'
annual film festivals, Osama, the title
of a film by Afghan director Siddiq Barmak, was greeted
with praise. And 
Sunday night it won a prestigious Golden
Globe award for best foreign film at a ceremony in
California. The Golden Globes are awarded by the
Hollywood Foreign Press Association and are considered a
good omen for the upcoming Academy Awards.
"I
would like to dedicate this prize to the people who lost
their trust in too much promises, to the people who lost
the meaning of 'luck' and to the people who gave me a
wonderful film, Osama," Barmak said in receiving
the prize. "This message is not only for Afghan
audiences. This, the message, was to the world."
Osama is the story of an Afghan family of
nearly all females who are left to fend for themselves
during the Taliban-era after the death of the father and
an uncle. The mother and grandmother of the clan force
the main character, a 12-year-old girl, to dress as a
boy in order to get a job and make money for the family.
The title comes from the name the girl uses in
her double life as a boy and is the only person
addressed in the film by name. Barmak says this loss of
identity is symbolic of Afghans losing their personal
identities as well as their cultural and national ones
under the repressive rule of the Taliban. "My film was
about horror. The whole atmosphere of the film is [about
being scared], so who is behind all of this? Who is
behind [all this] loss - Osama," Barmak said.
Osama
is Barmak's first feature-length film. He gained
experience directing short films and from 1992-96 headed
the government agency in charge of cinema. With the
arrival of the Taliban, Barmak l
ost his
job and fled the country in 1998, seeking asylum in
Pakistan. He returned home in 2002, assuming his old job
and beginning work on Osama.
For the
film, Barmak cast non-professional actors from
orphanages and refugee camps. Such people, he says, are
better able to portray the feelings of the average
Afghan. "They were very natural," he says. "They left me
with a lot of impressions during the shooting and they
made a lot of improvisation because they were real
people that could feel this situation. Especially the
little girl who played the main character - she saw a
lot of suffering, and she was a witness to a lot of
tragedies."
The little girl he speaks of is
Marina Golbahari, who Barmak found begging in the
streets of Kabul. The Taliban arrested Golbahari's
father numerous times, her sister was killed in a rocket
attack and her remaining 11 brothers and sisters were
left destitute. At the time she was cast in
Osama, Golbahari had never seen a film before.
Barmak says he believes she was able to play the role so
well because her own experiences were so close to the
movie's storyline. Golbahari is now attending school and
has told Barmak she hopes to continue acting.
When Barmak screened the film in Afghanistan,
audience members approached him to say how closely the
bleak film mirrored their own experiences. "They told me
a lot of things, that they saw their own [faces], that
they saw their own history and now they're feeling very
deeply their own pain, because they never thought about
it before."
The original ending to the film was
a happy one. After the Taliban exposes Osama's true
gender, her only way to avoid death by stoning is to
become the fourth wife of an elderly mullah. Originally,
Barmak showed the girl escaping. But then, he says, he
decided the "happily ever after" ending was too naive.
Out of respect for the audience, for whom such an escape
was not an option, he drew the film to a bleaker end.
Barmak says he did not expect such a warm
reception from an Afghan audience, considering the
painfully familiar story. Afghan audiences, he says,
tend to favor "Bollywood" musicals and more upbeat
productions. But he says the enthusiastic response to
Osama is one of many signs that Afghans may be
growing more optimistic about their future.
The
response from the West has been similarly rewarding. In
addition to winning the Golden Globe, Osama won a
special mention at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2003,
as well as the main prize at Montreal's New Movie and
New Media Festival in October 2003. In November 2003,
Barmak picked up the London Film Festival's Sutherland
Trophy for the most original and imaginative movie at
the event.
Nominations for the Academy Awards
will be announced on January 27 and the ceremony itself
will be held in Los Angeles on February 29. The American
film company United Artists has picked up the film for
distribution and it has begun to be screened across
Europe and the United States.
The message of the
film, Barmak says, is universal: "This message is not
only for Afghan audiences. This, the message, was to the
world, because I thought that this was not only an
Afghan tragedy. It was not a story that belongs to
Afghans. It can happen anywhere, by extremism, by
fundamentalism."
Barmak says he will not tackle
such a weighty topic for his next project. This time
around, he is working on a comedy because he wants to
see laughter on the faces of his countrymen.
Copyright (c) 2004, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted
with the permission of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty,
1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20036
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