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Reviews
Safar-e Ghandehar (2001)
under appreciated...
Since the start of the film the audience is fooled to believe that it is a story about a woman trying to stop her sister from committing suicide. For that she goes through a long journey to Kandahar which is in a region where women are not expected to travel alone without a man (i.e his husband or brother). But the story slowly evolves and penetrates into the life of people there. Throughout the experience there are times where in one can see the struggles of the Afghans but also the fact that major things for us like losing a limb because of a land mine seems like a daily routine for them.
The filmmaker has clearly set his priorities right. Many people feel the end was unsatisfactory since the whole point of stopping the character's sister from dying was completely neglected. The end seemed incomplete but this "unfinished" work was what I liked the most. In the end you are made to realize that issues like suicide is nothing compared to the struggle of the people living there daily fighting or precisely being victims of terror, suppression, mass murder. So the motive of the journey wasn't substantially important for the filmmaker as much as the journey itself. He chose to discard what seemed unimportant and that is what really made this movie stand out.
What the movie lacked was the true essence of being there. Throughout the film, the afghans were portrayed as mere victims with a life full of struggles. The film seemed to be from a foreign point of view.
This film is worth a watch. I give it a 7