| Review - View From a Grain of Sand
This article originally appeared in the spring/summer 2007 issue of
make/shift (www.makeshiftmag.com).
by Jessica Hoffmann
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Women in Afghanistan were not suddenly plunged into brutal un-freedom when the Taliban came to power in 1996. Nor have they always been subject to repressive rule. In a documentary that is both intimate and broadly political, Meena Nanji offers a view of the past thirty years of Afghanistan's history through the lives of three women.
Wajeeha is a literacy instructor and activist with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA); her husband died fighting against the Soviets in the 1980s. Roeena is a defiantly unmarried doctor who works in refugee camps populated mostly by people who fled Afghanistan when competing warlords reigned in the mid-1990s. Shapire, along with her husband and children, fled Afghanistan after the Taliban assumed power. She now teaches girls in a refugee camp.
Via interviews, narration, and vérité and archival footage, Nanji compellingly argues that the loss of women's rights in Afghanistan is not a simple story that revolves around the Taliban. It is a much larger-and continuing-story of a nation that has suffered through near-constant war and mass displacement over several decades.
A 1964 constitution implemented by then-king Zahir Shah established democracy and civil and women's rights in Afghanistan. For years, the nation was at peace, and urban women had access to education and jobs. But after the king was ousted in 1973, the nation descended into factional violence. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded to prop up a nascent Marxist regime, and the United States responded by developing a resistance movement of religious fundamentalists. For a decade, a U.S./Soviet Cold War battle was fought on, over, and with the land and lives of the Afghan people. Many fled to Pakistan and Iran.
And then, in 1989, the foreign powers withdrew, leaving Afghanistan with a power vacuum and an organized, well-armed movement of religious fundamentalists. From 1992 to 1996, competing warlords ruled. Another wave of people fled. In 1996, the Taliban came to power. U.S. readers should be well aware of what happened in Afghanistan in 2001.
The women in View from a Grain of Sand have lived through all of this. The film was shot in refugee camps and within Afghanistan over three visits-in fall 2000 (while the Taliban reigned and the world mostly ignored it); in fall 2001 (just after 9/11); and in 2003 (after the U.S. attacks, the fall of the Taliban, and the creation of a parliament dominated by the very same warlords who had reigned during the chaotic years of 1992 to 1996). Meena Nanji has documented her subjects' stories as they moved from obscurity to a focus of global attention. She has also documented the constancy of their struggles. These women's lives reflect continuous repression, lack of resources, and active work for change through a series of power shifts, all of which have been marked by violence and instability.
Nanji herself was born in Kenya to South Asian parents. She moved to England when she was a child and to the United States as a teen. This is her third film tracing the effects of disruption and displacement on people and cultures.
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