Cheap Eats
By Dan Leone

Our Masthead

Editorial Staff

Business Staff

Jobs & Internships

POOR, GEOGRAPHICALLY difficult, and geologically of little capitalist interest, Afghanistan spent most of the 20th century being ignored by major powers. Its profile eventually grew only through a series of dismal events, with peak awareness following Sept. 11 – which characterized the nation as a guilty harborer of an international fugitive, one who apparently still survives despite all U.S. efforts to bomb the place out of existence. Filmmaker Atiq Rahimi's (A)fghanistan, an Impossible State? is named after the belief held by his father (who fled during political upheavals in the '60s) that his native land lost its capital vowel decades ago – leaving a different word that translates as "land of screams and moans." This 53-minute pocket history (which is French financed but mostly in English) laments the seeming impossibility of its subject ever reuniting elements that once peacefully coexisted: religions serving Buddha, Mohammad, and Zoroaster, as well as myriad ethnicities and languages. Chronicled here are efforts by still-living, long-exiled King Zaher Shah to dismantle his family's monarchy in favor of a fragile constitutional democracy caught between Western and Iron bloc interests. That government's 1978 overthrow and subsequent Communist coup were followed by a catastrophic Soviet invasion (with more than one million Afghanis killed). Establishment of an Islamic Republic in '92 brought some order (if also considerable repression) but left the country vulnerable to manipulation by the foreign-funded Taliban army. This saga of strife and chaos has once again left Afghanistan "back at square one," Rahimi sighs, and farther than ever from political stability or even meeting its population's most basic needs. Interviews with diplomats, ministers, and the king, alongside recent and rare older archival footage, make (A)fghanistan a compellingly compact document. See Rep Clock for show times. (Dennis Harvey)