E-Mail This Article to a Friend RETURN TO KANDAHAR

Canadian broadcast journalist Nelofer Pazira’s first attempt to find her childhood friend Dyana in Afghanistan resulted in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 2001 pseudo-documentary Kandahar, in which Nafas (Pazira) returns to the country she fled to try to find her suicidal sister. Made by Pazira and Paul Jay, Return to Kandahar is an actual documentary in which Pazira — now truly searching for Dyana — makes a second return, seven months after the fall of the Taliban, 13 years after her flight at age 16. What she finds, and doesn’t find, makes for a frank and discouraging look at the anarchic, poverty-stricken, oppressed state of post-Taliban Afghanistan. The film follows Pazira on the desiccated streets of Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, and Kandahar as she talks with soldiers, refugees, students, and warlords. Throughout, citizens speak of getting rid of weapons (they’re like germs, says one) and having more access to education. When Pazira returns to her childhood school in Kabul, she finds classrooms without chairs and a library stripped of books. In the most intense moment, a crowd of men surround her after she’s interviewed female students, one arguing that she has no right to film their women. Pazira is passionate, articulate, and heroic in her response. (65 minutes)