An Index of Unfinished Histories: Mariam Ghani on Afghan Cinema

Afghanistan’s political history includes several shifts in power within the Communist Party and its many iterations from 1978 until its dissolution in 1992. Artist, writer and filmmaker Mariam Ghani has resuscitated five films that were shot at various points in this temporal bracket, which had been left unfinished during the editing phase. The films are titled The April Revolution (1978), Soqoot (Downfall, 1987), Almas-e-Siah (The Black Diamond, 1989), Kaj-Rah (Wrong Way, 1990) and Gomashta (Agent, 1991). Retrieved from among other aborted projects and failed experiments in the drawers of the state-run Afghan Film archives, Ghani uses them as an entry point in her documentary, What We Left Unfinished (2019), where she mobilises them to interrogate the idealised Afghan national imaginary as it manifests in these state-sponsored fictional works. A utopian project of the Afghan Left, the films never came under the scrutiny of the censorship board, having been abandoned post-production. As a result, in contemporary viewings, the footage reveals subliminal elements that betray the everyday violence under the Communist regime despite overt attempts to the contrary.

Departing from the successful and popular melodramatic cinema of the era, these films were centred on political conflict and any personal commentary had to be encoded into the respective narrative through allegory. Understood as failed propaganda, the incomplete films were engaged in a myth-making project that was repeatedly undone by rapid regime changes in the embattled nation. The films often combined fiction with footage from newsreels, resulting in a hybrid gestalt of political memory. A work of cultural archaeology, What We Left Unfinished combines excerpts from these feature films with raw newsreel footage from the period as well as oral narratives from then actors and participants—thereby almost mimicking the techniques of the content engaged with. In this first of a two-part conversation series, Ghani talks about how the documentary attempts to recuperate an Afghanistan situated in the gaps between lived realities and totalising aspirations.

What We Left Unfinished (2019) has recently had a theatrical release in the United States of America and is available virtually on the distribution site DEKANALOG.

_{(Featured Image: A Scene from Abdulkhalek Halil’s Unfinished Film Almas-e-Siah [The Black Diamond]. Still from What We Left Unfinished. Mariam Ghani. 2019. Image courtesy of the artist and Indexical Films.)}

Interview taken on 20 July 2021.

To read more about moving image practices by Afghan artists, please click here and here.

To watch the second part of this conversation, please click here.