A tiny piece of Bollywood

Saibal Chatterjee

The 51st edition of Directors’ Fortnight, which runs parallel to the 72nd Cannes Film Festival, will see Bollywood playing a bit role in Parwareshgah (The Orphanage), 29-year-old Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat’s second feature. 

The 90-minute film, set in the late 1980s Kabul, is about a teenager who is exceedingly fond of Mumbai cinema and “daydreams himself into some of his favourite movie scenes”. The boy, Qodrat, lives on the streets and sells movie tickets on the black market. 

One day, the police pick him up and deposit him in an orphanage run by the occupying Soviet forces. But the political situation in Afghanistan is changing rapidly. The Mujahideen wrest control of the war-ravaged country. The protagonist and his friends want to defend their home.

Parwareshgah, second part of a planned pentalogy, has been adapted from the unpublished 800-page memoirs of Shahrbanoo’s friend Anwar Hashimi. The latter grew up in the same village as hers in central Afghanistan but a couple of decades earlier than her. The series began with 2016’s Wolf and Sheep, which, too, made the Directors’ Fortnight cut and won the Art Cinema Award.

This isn’t the first time Bollywood is riding into town on the back of a film from Afghanistan. In 2017, Directors’ Fortnight had programmed Nothingwood, a documentary film by French director Sonia Kronlund about Afghan actor-producer-director Salim Shaheen, a flamboyant, irrepressible ‘showman’ who idolises yesteryear Mumbai movie star Dharmendra and has churned out quickies through three decades of war and devastation. The soundtrack of Nothingwood, laced with Hindi film songs, had the audience on its feet. 

Shahrbanoo, born in Teheran in 1990 to Afghan refugee parents, developed Wolf and Sheep in the Cannes Cinefondation Residency in 2010. Only 20 years old back then, she was the youngest director ever selected for the programme. It took her several years to complete the crowd-funded film, which eventually saw the light of day thanks to the support extended by German-born Denmark-based producer Katja Adomeit, who also collaborated on the screenplay.

Adomeit, who co-produced the 2017 Palme d’Or-winning Ruben Ostlund film The Square through the Coproduction Office Denmark, has also backed Parwareshgah, a Danish-German-Luxembourgian-Afghan venture. Parwareshgah is one of 24 feature films selected for the genre-heavy 2019 Directors’ Fortnight. But it promises to bank upon the understated, observational, ethnographic style that Shahrbanoo adopted for her first film. Parawareshgah was shot on locations in Tajikistan, Germany and Denmark. 

The filmmaker’s personal story is as fascinating as that of Qodrat, the onscreen fictional avatar of her friend. After the events of 9/11, Shahrbanoo’s family relocated to a village in remote central Afghanistan when she was 11. She spoke Persian. The language of the villagers was Hazaragi. She suffered from severe near-sightedness but nobody was aware of her condition. 

She lived in the village until 2008 unable to ‘see’ much. It made her a good listener. The villagers were great storytellers. Their stories weren’t written down but transmitted orally. A story changed a little with every retelling. Every story, therefore, had hundreds of versions, an aspect of life in Afghanistan that Shahrbanoo brought out in Wolf and Sheep, a film set in a shepherd community in the mountains where myth and reality overlap almost imperceptibly.

In 2009, after she shifted to Kabul, Shahrbanoo got her first pair of glasses and started to watch movies and read books. It was akin to a rebirth. She studied documentary filmmaking in an Ateliers Varan workshop in Kabul. She incorporated elements of what she learnt there in her fiction films. Her very first film, the short fiction Vice Versa One was selected Directors’ Fortnight in 2011. In 2013, Shahrbanoo set up her won production company, Wolf Pictures, in Kabul.

The only active Afghan woman filmmaker, Shahrbanoo Sadat is conscious of the need to counter the cliched view of her country that cinema tends to peddle. She, therefore, strives to present an alternative portrait of a strife-torn nation in which creative young people like her and her friend Anwar continue to live on their own terms, driven by hope, optimism and a desire for change.