Learning to See: Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Afghan Alphabet

Mohsen Makhmalbaf shot Afghan Alphabet (Alefba-ye Afghan) late in the year 2001 after Kandahar had been screened at the Cannes Film Festival and then across European and American theatres. By the time he started shooting his documentary in October, the 11 September 2001 attacks had come about, changing the nature of the world’s focus on Afghanistan—and, indeed, accounting for the large success of Kandahar on Western screens. Makhmalbaf was working to raise funds for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), so that the organisation could aid educational efforts for Afghan refugee children in Iran, and his film sought to give an account of these children. There were nearly 700,000 of them in Iran by then, and their education was stalled since they did not have legal rights and identity cards that were necessary for admittance to state schools. It is not implied as much as explicitly shown that the absence of a state schooling structure creates a vacuum into which rote, unquestioning forms of indoctrination rush in.

Set in the ambiguous border zone between Iran and Afghanistan—that saw an increasing flux of refugees since the Taliban took over the country’s rule in the mid-1990s—Makhmalbaf’s film is addressed both to the general, world audience as well as Iranian audiences. The latter were perhaps crucial as they were the ones who could actually influence legislation that could legalise the presence of the refugee children. It had this intended effect in Iran, making it, as Hamid Naficy put it, “…one of the rare documentaries leading to legislation improving the cause it espoused.” The film was completed by November 2001, which tells us about the urgency that motivated Makhmalbaf’s documentary. It was shot on a digital video camera, typically again with the help of his family—which included the filmmakers Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf—and runs to forty-five minutes in length.

The film is organised around this urgency of providing proper schooling to the refugee children, most of whom are still traumatised by their escape from the Taliban. For some, especially the girls, this trauma finds expression when they show how much they are still in thrall to Taliban’s sacred authority. A girl refuses to remove her veil in front of the filmmakers, saying that it would be a sin. To do so would go against the wishes of her dead father who was a religious cleric, as well as Mullah Omar, the founder of the Taliban who would regularly narrate a story about the prophet keeping his wife locked up in a box. The filmmaker provokes the girl into a confrontation about her beliefs and triumphantly ends with a shot of her unveiled face after having finally changed her mind. It is not just the filmmaker’s patient, importunate (male) voice that provokes the change but also the sympathetic entreaties of a fellow female-classmate of hers. Nonetheless, this scene forced UNICEF to drop their project with Makhmalbaf, according to Hamid Dabashi.

Makhmalbaf’s film is deliberately confrontational and avoids the kind of ambivalence that his fictional narratives might invite. He shows the tragic exclusion of the children as they attempt to catch snatches of instruction flying out of a classroom door and express a desire to learn. Even in their “unenlightened” states, many of the children refuse to choose a “lesser evil” between the Americans and the Taliban.

While scenes like the one described earlier provoke a discomfort in the (Western) liberal viewer who wishes not to implicate their critique of violence and imperialism with an ignorance of cultural norms; it remains a powerful, interventionist effort by a filmmaker who does not pretend to be objective (or “liberal” as one may understand it, considering Makhmalbaf’s radical roots in the Iranian Revolution which employed a theological critique of the Pahlavi dynasty) about the problems facing modern Afghanistan.

To read more about Afghanistan, please click here, here, here, here and here.

To read more about Mohsen Makhmalbaf, please click here.

All images from Afghan Alphabet by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Iran, 2001. Images courtesy of Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the Makhmalbaf Film House.