An image from the documentary film "My Afghanistan", directed by Nagieb Khaja. Credit: Henrik Bohn Ipsen

By Sudeshna Chowdhury
NEW YORK, Jun 26 2013 (IPS)

A bomb blast on a road. A suicide attack near a grocery store. Such is the uncertainty for ordinary men and women in Afghanistan, where daily life is still marred by violence.

The documentary film “My Afghanistan: Life in the Forbidden Zone“, directed by Nagieb Khaja and screened recently at the 2013 Human Rights Watch film festival in New York City, depicts this uncertainty, bringing viewers to Afghanistan’s war-torn Helmand province, where the film’s subjects, with the help of mobile phones, tell their own stories.

There is Hakl Sahab, who drives a dilapidated jeep without brakes, and Abdul Mohammed, who loves his farm and his wife. The film also shows the struggle and determination of a woman who wants to become a journalist.

IPS correspondent Sudeshna Chowdhury spoke with filmmaker Nagieb Khaja about how these subjects portray a different side of Afghanistan from what media usually showcase and how Khaja tells the story of civilians caught in the crossfire.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: So many movies have been made on Afghanistan. What did you want to communicate with your film?

A: The mainstream media does not show the full story of Afghanistan. Moreover, I do not think there have been a lot of documentary films in the past that show a civilian perspective of Afghanistan, especially in rural areas."The mainstream media does not show the full story of Afghanistan."
-- Nagieb Khaja

We have had documentaries from Kabul, and we have had documentaries on Afghanistan’s pop culture. We have had a lot of small sunshine stories told through movies. But the rural population in Afghanistan has been left out.

Q: Why have mainstream media and journalists not focused enough on rural Afghanistan?

A: The obvious reasons are security and the risk of getting kidnapped. Most of Helmand in Afghanistan is rural. If I wanted to make a film where the audience could actually follow my subjects and see what kind of life they lead, my cameraman and I would have to live with the subjects and accompany them everywhere. All my subjects, as well as my cameraman and I, would draw a lot of attention and risk many lives.

For journalists, it is not impossible for anyone to go out in these areas and interview people. What matters is the method you use to meet the demands of your project or the story you are working on.

If I, as a journalist, lived in a village with a family for a week, people in the area would immediately learn that some stranger is living with the family. Then this family or person could be accused of assisting foreign forces, and they would get into trouble.

All these factors are huge impediments when it comes to making documentaries in rural areas from a civilian perspective in such a way that you can really get to know them.

Q: Why did you use mobile phones for the movie?

A: To have somebody walking around with a video camera is not normal in rural Afghanistan. With mobile phones, it was easier because a lot of people already have mobile phones. So it wasn’t something unusual, although the phones I gave them had touchscreens and were much more expensive than what they were using.

Q: What concerns did you have when you were working on the movie?

A: I was really concerned about one of the women who was a subject in the movie. I was concerned not only about her immediate security but the effect her participation in this project could have on her socially – she might be ostracised if people found out that she was filming for this movie.

The second thing was security issues for some of the contributors living in war zones.

Q: Why did you call the movie “My Afghanistan?”

A: My parents are from Afghanistan – my father left Afghanistan for Pakistan before moving to Germany and then Denmark. I had also visited Afghanistan earlier and was kidnapped by the Taliban.

So 20 percent of the movie constitutes my take on Afghanistan, which I experienced in a way that is not perceived by Western media. But most importantly, 80 percent of the movie features the way my subjects perceive Afghanistan currently.

Q: How different was Afghanistan under the Soviets?

A: The Soviets were brutal when it came to punishing civilians, but infrastructure and education were much more developed during the Soviet era than what we see now. You would see women wearing skirts, and they had a lot of freedom. There was less corruption, too. Right now Afghanistan has a much more conservative society.

But the motives behind the Soviets coming to Afghanistan and the Western forces coming to Afghanistan were different. The Western forces came to Afghanistan for Al-Qaeda. Afterwards, they kept fighting the Taliban. The Soviet Union managed to gain much more than the Western forces.

What I am saying is that the risk of Afghanistan becoming a much more regressive society is huge. And the world bodies are not doing enough because the United States is the one leading the negotiations. We need a mediator.

Q: Do people in Afghanistan want foreign forces to withdraw as soon as possible?

A: The majority of people in Afghanistan want foreign forces to leave not because they support the Taliban, but because the majority of Afghans do not support anyone, including the government.

People there do not see any benefit from a foreign presence. They have this mentality that they want to sort out their problems themselves.

Excerpt:

Mumia Abu-Jamal is without doubt the United States’ most well-known prisoner. After living on death row for 30 years, Abu-Jamal’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in early 2012 after decades of advocacy by anti-death penalty and anti-racist activists.

It comes as something of a shock, then, that despite Abu-Jamal’s status as a cause célèbre, there is no comprehensive biography of the man’s life and achievements. “Long Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal”, a new film by Stephen Vittoria, fills that gap.

The film’s interviewees include such luminaries as Alice Walker and Cornel West alongside noted independent journalists Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, and Dave Zirin and a host of other cultural and political icons. Through a combination of meticulous research and heavy use of archival footage, Vittoria constructs a powerful narrative of Abu-Jamal’s life and career as a journalist and social critic.

Vittoria came to make “Long Distance Revolutionary” somewhat serendipitously. While working on a different documentary project called “Murder Incorporated: Empire, Genocide and Manifest Destiny”, he interviewed left-wing intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, and Abu-Jamal.

“We were going to attempt to tell the 500-year story of the march of empire,” Vittoria told IPS, “from the time Columbus set foot on Hispaniola to the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Sensing that the scope of that narrative was too ambitious for a feature film, Vittoria sidelined the project and decided instead to tell the story of Abu-Jamal’s life.

Other films about Abu-Jamal have focused primarily or in some cases exclusively on the controversial murder conviction for the shooting of a police officer that landed him on death row. “Long Distance Revolutionary” takes the polar opposite approach. It treats the case the same way that Abu-Jamal seems to: as a fact of his life. As the film emphasises repeatedly, Abu-Jamal has never used his platform to protest his own conviction.

“Whether the case existed or not, this guy is a brilliant journalist who over the course of the last three decades has evolved into a brilliant social critic,” Vittoria says.

Although Mumia is a household name to many progressives and leftists, little attention is paid to his life beyond his case. Vittoria calls his film “an untold history of Mumia”.

True to its subtitle, “Long Distance Revolutionary” takes the audience on a journey through Abu-Jamal’s life. The narrative flows through his career, beginning with his start as a journalist for the Black Panther newspaper at the age of 15 to his career as a reporter for the Philadelphia National Public Radio affiliate.

We follow his meteoric rise as a successful broadcaster, becoming a featured reporter on NPR’s show All Things Considered. Then, Abu-Jamal was elected president of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists and turns down a lucrative offer to become a television reporter because the station would have required he cut off his dreadlocks.

Along the way, the film’s impressive cast paints a picture of a Philadelphia filled with overt racism and police brutality, obscured, in Temple University professor Linn Washington’s words, by “a veneer of liberalism and a Quaker mystique.” At the centre of this tension is Abu-Jamal, whom Philadelphia police make a point of watching closely.

Filming Abu-Jamal has not been permitted since 1996. To shoot a documentary with your primary subject unable to be filmed presents a unique set of challenges. Vittoria jests that “it’s like filming Jaws without being able to show the shark.” But it is in working through these limitations that Vittoria’s art as a director shines.

One way Vittoria brings Abu-Jamal to life while he is physically absent is having the film’s pundits read aloud selections from the books Abu-Jamal penned from behind bars. “I wanted to see how Mumia’s words came from the people we had in the film,” Vittoria says. In addition to the regular interviewees, a crew of spoken word artists also take turns reading and interpreting Abu-Jamal’s words.

Even with this, Vittoria still had to grapple with the inability to film Abu-Jamal in his prison cell, which is a defining part of his existence for the past three decades. To not show the cell would be to not accurately portray Mumia. Vittoria made the risky artistic decision to stage a recreation of the cell using a lookalike actor, Troy Alcendor.

“I’m not a huge fan of recreations in films,” Vittoria tells IPS. “But recreations work if they are done in a very stylised manner so you’re just giving the audience a hint of what you’re representing. You’re not trying to make it a docudrama; you’re almost trying to make it like a painting. I wanted those scenes to be poetry. And the poetry is beautiful as he’s writing or it’s ugly as he’s just existing in this cinderblock cage.”

The risk pays off as those scenes provide a uniquely human element to the film, which is sorely lacking in other portrayals. Although the producers of the film are all sympathetic to Abu-Jamal’s politics, it refrains from being an exercise in hero worship. The film is about who Abu-Jamal is as a human being as much as anything else.

In one scene, we are told that visitations to Abu-Jamal at prison are “non-contact”. Actor Giancarlo Esposito remarks, “I imagine he must be extremely sensitive on his skin and on his touch,” offering viewers an opportunity to ponder a side of Abu-Jamal not often seen. The film is full of such moments and succeeds in humanising a man who has been so violently dehumanised.

Despite their close relationship that has blossomed through the film-making process, Abu-Jamal has not seen the film and according to Vittoria had no editorial say over its production. They are currently co-writing “Murder Incorporated”, which has been turned into a book, trading off chapters and mailing them to each other in and out of prison.

Stephen Vittoria is also the director of “One Bright Shining Moment”, a 2005 film about George McGovern’s 1972 grassroots-based presidential bid. Following a successful festival run, “Long Distance Revolutionary” opens in New York City on Feb. 1 and Los Angeles on Mar. 1.

Robin J. Hayes has always been one to break boundaries. Most recently, she is doing so with her latest documentary film, “Black and Cuba”, which explores how African-Americans and Afro-Cubans can learn from each other about community-building and public debates on racism in their countries.

“A film can be shown in so many different community spaces,” Hayes, a filmmaker and scholar at the New School, told IPS. “It gives many different types of people an opportunity to learn about issues that are important to them.”

Robin J. Hayes, documentary filmmaker and scholar at the New School. Photo courtesy of Robin J. Hayes

After completing her bachelor’s degree at the New York University, Hayes was a community organiser for a legal clinic to assist homeless families at the Urban Justice Centre. She was the first person at Yale University to earn a combined doctorate degree in African-American Studies and Political Science. She has also served as a national coordinator of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organisation (IFCO).

But Hayes wanted to share her vision with a broader audience, so she became a filmmaker. She continues to conduct research, write, publish and lecture throughout the nation on the politics of the African Diaspora.

Hayes spoke to IPS correspondent Rebecca Hanser about her life as an academic and filmmaker and about her latest documentary.

Q: As a scholar, you work a lot with themes concerning ethnicity, race, (in)equality policies, African-American cultures and black political movements. What draws you to these themes and is it something you feel personally related to?

A: As a scholar, I am drawn to research about race, social movements and black cultures around the world because of my experience as a community organiser. Before grad school, I worked for several years with an organisation called IFCO/Pastors for Peace that advocated for a “people’s foreign policy” in the Americas.

During my time at IFCO, I met people from all walks of life who worked across borders to create social change. I’m also a native of East Flatbush, Brooklyn and am one of a few people on my block that was able to get an advanced degree.

Q: What is your latest documentary “Black and Cuba” about? What inspired you to make it and why in Cuba?

A: “Black and Cuba” follows a diverse group of Yale students who feel like outcasts at their elite institution, band together and adventure to Cuba to see if revolution is truly possible. It is based on a short documentary I directed, entitled “Beautiful Me(s): Finding our Revolutionary Selves in Black Cuba”.

I was one of the students who made that journey to Cuba. Many of the students were from neighbourhoods like mine. The idea for the film came out of our desire to take what we learned from this trip and share it with our family members and neighbours who had done so much to support our educational success but were still grappling with the challenges of racial inequality and economic hardship. A documentary made information accessible in a way that our academic work could not.

We were drawn to Cuba because we were interested in seeing how the ideas we were learning about could play out on the ground. Cuba did have a revolution in 1959, after which many socialist reforms were made, including implementing universal health care and ending private education. With 60 percent of the population being black, it seemed like the perfect place to explore the possibilities of addressing issues related to racism and class.

Q: What can you share about the process of filming this documentary? What was it like to be in Cuba with the other travellers? How has this journey changed your life?

A: Our group worked hard to raise funds for the trip, which was organised through the Centre for Cuban Studies, so we had developed a close bond by the time we travelled to Cuba. We did not have much in terms of previous filmmaking experience, which I think helped us capture our experiences in a very earnest way.

In Cuba, we spent a lot of time having candid conversations with all kinds of people—rappers, students, teachers—and learning as much about their impressions of life in the United States as we did about their experiences in Cuba. Also, we saw some sites and performances that are a bit off the usual tourist path, such as the Monument to the Maroons in Santiago, which is a World UNESCO Heritage Site.

The journey changed my life in that it gave me a great deal of optimism about the possibilities of change. Afro-Cubans and African Americans have overcome a great number of obstacles, but there is still a lot of work to do.

Q: For your studies and work you have travelled all over the country and beyond. In your view, what should be change in terms of ethnic and racial policies in the United States?

A: “Black and Cuba” discusses some of the issues that arise from racial and economic inequality, such as the racial achievement gap in education, violence and disparities in health care access. My hope is that viewers will decide for themselves what changes they would like to see in their communities and support organisations on the ground that are already working towards them.

In our group, we wanted to use our education to create the kind of social change that could improve our communities. It wasn’t enough for us to have opportunities when so many of our family members and neighbours do not.

Q: What made you combine your work as scholar and academic with filmmaking? Are films an effective way to convey your message?

A: I love my work as a scholar of race, inequality and politics, but academic writing is for a very specific audience. A film can be shown in so many different community spaces as well as on laptops, phones and tablets. It gives many different types of people an opportunity to learn about issues that are important to them.