https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS-zrh2c5UQ

This was the film I saw last Sunday.  A film by an Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who tells the story of life under the Taliban in the neighboring country of Afghanistan. It is based on the true story of  an Afghan  journalist  who had immigrated to Canada with her family.

The story tells of her desperate journey to get to Kandahar to find her sister who has threatened  suicide on the day of the last solar eclipse in the 20th Century in Kandahar.  This city is a familiar  name from the terrible assaults by the US Marines there. The story is told by a narrator  in the third person.  The  audience is an observer  and not a participant  emotionally connected to the characters unlike the way  I felt in ‘Departures.’ The beautiful shots of the hostile , merciless desert  landscape adds to the totally negative picture of life in Afghanistan under the Taliban.  There is constant  fear of death by bullets or nature, robbery, arrest, famine and for the women, the prison of their burkas. The results of Russian landmines keft after that war,  has a major part in the movie with many people either on crutches or poorly made prosthesis  which took a year to get.  The film is a PG and would be a good film to share cultures with school age children. I haven’t checked, but this is probably available on Netflix.