Kandahar

Kandahar (Dari: , "Qandahar") is a 2001 Iranian film directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, set in Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban. Its original Afghan title is Safar-e Ghandehar, which means "Journey to Kandahar", and it is alternatively known as The Sun Behind the Moon. The film is based on a partly true, partly fictionalized story of Nafas, a successful Afghan-Canadian woman played by Nelofer Pazira. The film recounts the attempts of Nafas to return to Afghanistan after receiving a letter from her sister, who was left behind when the family escaped from Afghanistan years earlier. Nafas makes this desperate mission in an effort to rescue her sister, who has written in her letter that she plans to commit suicide on the last solar eclipse of the millennium. Kandahar was filmed mostly in Iran, including at the Niatak refugee camp, but also secretly in Afghanistan itself. Most people, including Nelofer Pazira, played themselves. Plot Nafas, an Afghan woman living in safety in Canada, arrives in Iran, dons a burqa, and enters Afghanistan posing as a wife in a family of refugees attempting to return to their homeland. Brigands rob them along the road to Kandahar. They decide to return to Iran, but Nafas must continue on her mission to save her maimed sister from suicide. She pays Khak, a boy recently expelled from a Qur'anic school, to be her guide. Khak brings Nafas to a village doctor when she gets sick from drinking unsanitized well water. The doctor reveals himself to be an African American convert to Islam, who must wear a fake beard (which he calls "a man's burqa") because he can't grow one. Out of fear of being found out, Khak is dismissed, and the doctor takes Nafas by horse cart. Along the way, he confides with her that he has no formal medical training and has become disillusioned with the turn the country has taken under the Taliban.