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Nelofer Pazira: Change comes from within

JP/Prodita SabariniNelofer Pazira, a filmmaker, actress and journalist who grew up in Kabul, Afghanistan, under Soviet rule, never knew if her house would still be standing when she came home from school – or razed by a bomb

Prodita Sabarini (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Mon, August 23, 2010

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Nelofer Pazira: Change comes from within

JP/Prodita Sabarini

Nelofer Pazira, a filmmaker, actress and journalist who grew up in Kabul, Afghanistan, under Soviet rule, never knew if her house would still be standing when she came home from school – or razed by a bomb.

In 1989, Pazira and her family fled to Pakistan and a year later to New Brunswick, Canada. In 1996, she returned to Afghanistan, after the Soviets had left and the Taliban was ruling the country, wanting to find her childhood friend.

Pazira’s search was cut short as the situation became too dangerous. Despite not meeting her friend, Pazira embarked on a new project after her trip: tell the world at large about the experiences of the Afghan people through films and writing.

She starred in the 2001 film Kandahar, which was based on her journey. In 2003, she co-produced and co-directed the award-winning film Return to Kandahar. Her memoir A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of Afghanistan, recounting her family’s life in Kabul under Soviet rule, won the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize.

Her most recent feature-length film Act of Dishonor delves into the issues of violence against women, clash of cultures, and refugees. It tells the story of a young woman who agrees to participate in a film production carried out by an idealist Canadian film crew. When members of the community find out about her involvement in the movie, they pressure the young woman’s father and fiancé to kill her for having being in contact with foreign men. The Canadian film crew has no idea about the impact of their movie on the young woman’s life.

Pazira, 37, who was recently in Jakarta, said she wanted to go beyond telling stories with shock value about Afghanistan. She explained problems in Afghanistan were more complex than they appeared, and that people should view them within the right context.

She referred to the August Time magazine cover, which portrays a girl whose nose was severed as a punishment for fleeing an arranged marriage, used to exemplify the day-to-day violence plaguing women in Afghanistan. The title of the main story was “What happens if we leave Afghanistan”.

“My film is dealing with the issue of honor killing, issues of honor. It’s about violence against women. But I’m of the belief that you don’t need to show that [the actual violence]. You can show the social effects of it. You don’t have to shock people if you’re seeking a solution. And also, some of these practices are cultural. They will continue to exist until the society has developed enough to reject it themselves,” she said commenting on the Time cover.

On Time’s website, the magazine’s managing editor Rochard Stengel wrote that “the image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us.”

He added that he would rather people knew that reality as they made their minds up about what the US and its allies should do in Afghanistan.

For Pazira the key to the debate about America’s presence in Afghanistan is development. The focus should be on increasing funding for development instead of military operations, she went on. “If you spend more money on development, people have [access to] better education, drinking water and proper housing, so you reduce the level of poverty. That way the society itself can reach a point where it doesn’t want war anymore,” she said.

“In that sense, the American troops leaving is not so much of a problem. But if the world packs up altogether and leaves, then it will be problem.”

Sometimes people’s idealism blinds them to the consequences of their seemingly well-meaning actions, she explained.

“It’s a bitter kind of a thing. People with a sense of idealism think they can go to a society in a country and fix it, or that they can do good things. But they don’t realize in the process they can cause a lot of problems.”

Her aim is to stimulate a dialogue after people watch her movie.

“What’s the important issue? What’s important to the society? And why is it that women are portrayed as the ones in charge of preserving honor?”

It wasn’t easy for Pazira to leave her country. The family had to flee because her father had already been imprisoned once by the communist government and her brother had reached the age of conscription.

“And we didn’t want him to join the Afghan army,” she said. So they left all of their belonging behind, and set off on a 10-day walk to Pakistan, dressed as villagers. When they reached Pakistan, she was bewildered when her neighbors asked if she wanted to go for a walk at night.

“All my life, there was a curfew at night.” And in Canada, she was startled when people were not punished for saying what they thought.

She recalled that upon arriving in Canada, she immediately put away her pain and memories of the war to focus on learning English. “I stored the pain away. I said to myself, I can sit here and remember everything that happened to us, or I can just seize this moment to learn English, go to school, make something of my life and worry about the struggles and pain later on in my life.”

After completing her journalism degree, she kept being drawn back to Afghanistan and found that film was the best medium to get her message across.

“I believe a film can cross many boundaries and cultures,” she said. “It can convey a message faster because we can say so much with images.”

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