7 Pardeh

Little is known about Afghanistan, apart from a few clichés, the word Taliban, and a war which seems never to have stopped since the Soviet Union and the turning point reached in 2001. How can one do justice to a devastated country in a state of permanent conflict, and to its deeply afflicted population? With this film, Sepideh Farsi took up again the documentary format she had started with, and using only one camera, she embraced the beautiful task of reaching the very heart of the country. First, at the French Embassy in besieged and barricaded Kabul, where death and perils await in every building, at every street corner. Then, using her knowledge of Dari, a language close to her mother tongue, Farsi, she endeavoured to travel across the country. Meeting people along the way, she engaged in conversations with them, in a gentle and empathic fashion. In cars, with embassy or taxi drivers; on pathways, with workers or veterans from the fight against the Soviets, or with a young woman longing for independence; in the troglodyte homes of displaced farmers near Bâmiyân, or in the house of an aristocrat and former diplomat; with demonstrators. Always paying close attention to these people’s words and presences, to their bodies and environments, Sepideh Farsi painted in successive slight touches a whole gallery of portraits, all haunted by traces of History and filled with longings. Scrap after scrap, this uncritical, delicate and subjective patchwork aims at lifting the seven veils – from the legend told as an epigraph to the film – that cover the country. (NF)