Granaz Moussavi has followed up her 2009 hit My Tehran for Sale with an intimate look at street kids in Kabul.
Prompted by an Australia news report about two Afghan boys killed by an Australian defence attack, Moussavi created a fictional account of Hewad (Arafat Faiz), a nine-year-old boy working a street cart to earn money for his family, and his young friend Nawid (Elham Ahmad Ayazi). Hewad works, sells, hustles and tells everyone about his dreams of becoming a film star. His father was ‘martyred’ , something that seems too common for boys like him, and the culture means his mother and grandmother are not allowed to work.
We spend a lot of time with Hewad and get a sense of how hard it is for him to earn a living. He knows that hustle is how you get ahead and does a good line in making money out of anything he can. It looks like an opportunity has fallen in his lap when Australian photographer Andrew (played by real-life Australian photographer and Walkley Award winner Andrew Quilty, who lives in and documents Afghanistan) wants to photograph him.
For Hewad, this launches him into movie mogul mode and he entices other street kids to practice their acting with him (for money) so that they can all be film stars. Up until this point, it feels like we have been immersed in street culture and that Hewad is a plucky urchin who shows that you can always have dreams. The cinematography is lovely in a bleached-out way but it does drag a little as the sameness of Hewad’s days are played out. For a moment I thought that Hewad being loaned Quilty’s ‘second camera’ might springboard into a story of him representing his own life rather than being photographed by a foreigner but this story thread goes nowhere.
Where it came unstuck for me is in the very clumsy drama of the final act. It is not helped by Quilty’s lack of acting skills or dodgy editing but it is the perfunctory nature of it and the broad strokes and laboured cliches that let down an otherwise okay film.
Have you seen this film? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
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