Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.
My wife and kids got me a Blu-Ray player for Father’s Day. Sadly, I don’t have any Blu-Rays to play on it yet because it’s too new. While I’m certain I will get some eventually, I figured it would be a good idea to press it into service once it was hooked up, and since it plays DVDs as well as Blu-Rays, the latest offering from NetFlix it is. That latest offering is Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Safar e Ghandahar (Kandahar, also called The Sun Behind the Moon), the sort of film that tends to get a filmmaker like Makhmalbaf put on some sort of list for assassination. I could do worse for an inaugural disc.
It’s important that this film, released in 2001, chronicles life in Afghanistan before the current war there but after the takeover by the Taliban. While this is the story of a particular woman who has come to Afghanistan, it is also the story of what has happened in that country as a result of the brutal Taliban regime. If you haven’t been paying attention over the last decade and a half, that means theocracy, the oppression of women, and all of the evil this entails.
