Shadow City_A Woman Walks Kabul by Taran Khan

Author:Taran Khan [N. Khan, Taran]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1784742287
Amazon: B07NQ4WL19
Publisher: Vintage Digital
Published: 2019-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

We stopped watching the films at lunchtime. Nazira and I followed Arify out of the screening room and into a newly refurbished conference room. It was a world away from Afghan Film’s vintage decor. This room gleamed with the temporary sleekness of the Chinese-made furniture I found across Kabul’s offices. There were tables with pale-coloured veneers and metal legs, swivel chairs, metal filing cabinets. The light in the room was filtered through the row of trees that stood on the building’s perimeter. Beyond their nodding greenery, appearing and vanishing with the breeze, was the empty street.

Arify had ordered us pizzas from an upmarket Afghan-run bakery nearby, in lieu of the rice and beans that his colleagues were probably eating at that time, warm from the row of pressure cookers I had seen. As we ate, I asked Arify to tell me the story of how the Afghan Film archive was saved.

When the Taliban had captured the capital, they had shut down the studios of the national TV channel. Radio Kabul was renamed ‘Voice of Shariat Radio’ and broadcast mostly religious content – a mix of taranas, naats, sermons and religious speeches.8 Government officials ordered the employees of these institutions to collect their archives for destruction.

As a state-run organisation, Afghan Film came under their control too. The popular version of the story, the one I read and heard most often, was this: a few employees devised a plan to save their country’s visual heritage. They went secretly into the archive and did a quick, desperate selection of which films could be sacrificed, and which reels had to be saved. The former were mostly foreign films (from India, US, Russia, France) with negatives that were safely abroad. The remaining cans of films – made by Afghans over the years – were hidden in a room. They locked the door to this room, and painted it to make it look like part of the wall. This was the door that Arify had shown me on our tour that morning.

In hiding the films from the Taliban, the employees were taking a big risk, gambling with their very lives, I had read. The Minister for Information himself came to oversee the destruction of the films. ‘If I find one reel hidden in the building, I must kill you,’ he is reported to have told an employee.9 But somehow, the ruse worked. The Taliban built a bonfire of the films they found – thousands of reels – that burned for nearly two weeks. But unknown to them, the real treasures of the archive were safe, hidden under their noses.

Arify’s version agreed with the broad contours of this narrative. But while the story was true, it wasn’t the whole truth, he said.

The archive had not been targeted immediately after the Taliban took power in 1996, but in early 2001, soon after the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, he said. Most of the films had been burned at Pul-e-Charkhi, on the outskirts of Kabul.

Most importantly, the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.