[cross-posted in
It’s not often a film makes you angry at yourself for not having done enough.
Osama is the first feature film made in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Despite the title, it is not about Bin-Laden.
Rather, it uses the figure of a young girl diguised as a boy to explore the issues of both masculinity and femininity and how they were controlled and policed under the Taliban.
“Osama“ ‘s mother is a widow, her husband a martyr of the Kabul war, her brother dead in the Russian war. She is a doctor, but cannot practice after the Taliban close down the hospital she works in. Under the Taliban, none of the women can leave the house unaccompanied by a male relative. With no male to look after them, she despairs and wishes she’d had a son. She wishes women had never been created by a cruel God. She and her aging mother decide to disguise the young girl (nameless in the subtitles, apart from the assumed name of Osama) as a boy so she can work.
What follows is harrowing and fearful, but a fascinating insight into life under the Taliban. The gender play also allows the film to implicitly explore what life must have been like for effeminate boys as well.
The risks these film makers and actors have taken cannot be underestimated. The Taliban may be out of power, but this damning critique is still brave.
Strikingly, this is not a film about America, the world, the war, or any other issue. It is about Afghanistan. It is about the Taliban. It is about women and men and the erasure of history and tradition in the name of some twisted, monstrous invented neo-traditionalism. It is about cruelty and power. It is about freedom.
We should have done more. I should have done more. More anyway than signing a few electronic petitions.
This pathetic claim of the US now that they toppled the Taliban… ah, too little, too late and for all the wrong reasons.