Rating: 
Summary: A beautiful semi-documentary that teaches without words
Review: I can't vouch the following is how Kandahar's author, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, would describe his film. I can't even say whether, living in Iran, Makhmalbaf feels free to say what he means, otherwise than through film. However, he has put up a long background document on Afghanistan at http://www.makhmalbaf.com/articles.asp?pa=1&a=a16What I saw is a semi-documentary set in a desertic area of Afghanistan, built of long sequences each of which is very telling, admirably constructed and visually beautiful. In fact, the film has been criticized for its beauty. The topic about which the images are so telling, is what Afghan society (which is essentially rural) has been reduced to by twenty years of war, and especially the state of the female half of that society. The sequences are linked together by the fictional component. A 21-year old Afghan refugee from Ottawa, Canada, working as a journalist, wants to reach her sister in Kandahar before she commits suicide on the eclipse. The sister told her about her plan in a letter sent three months before, but events have left our protagonist on the Iranian border three days before the eclipse. The sequences occur as she progresses towards Kandahar. The sister has never left Afghanistan because on the way out with the rest of the family, 15 years before, she stepped on a mine and lost her legs. Her father remained with her, but he is now dead. The Canadian sister will never reach Kandahar. As the film ends, she has been caught by the Taliban, to no one's surprise. I surmise she will either be taken up as booty by a commander, for a Xth wife or concubine, or will be raped by soldiers, as booty again, and left to fend as a prostitute until caught again and executed. She may well live no longer than her sister. In my reading the protagonist's naive self-centeredness is meant to set off the non-fictional images. There is a visual leitmotif translating this egocentrism. On all occasions, the girl keeps dictating her precious thoughts and "candles of hope" for her sister into a small tape recorder -- in English, which of course her sister can't understand: she's dictating to her own sensitive self. Her attachment to the machine is the reason she gets caught. A second English-speaking character is provided, who is as full of modesty and truth as she is blind and vapid. This is an American black Muslim who came to Afghanistan over fifteen years before looking for God by fighting the Russians, and has now learned to simply look for opportunities to do good. There is an unfinished dialog on the topic of hope, and, reading between the lines, my perception is that the endless war has cleansed Afghan society of any occasion for hope, especially for women, and that this cleansing is simply expressed through the Taliban. Hence the importance of doing good because it is good, and not because it is a "candle of hope". Whether or not I am right in any of this, I am sure Kandahar will tell you much also, of things that cannot be written but can be shown.
Rating:
Summary: Great Movie- Makes You Think
Review: I love middle eastern films. So count on me to rarely give a low rating. Most of them are worth the rating. This movie is about a woman who tries to save her sister before the next eclipse- which is coming very soon. It speaks about her travels through Iran to Afganistan. And believe me she has many trials, but someone always helped her. I am not going to share too much about this movie because I feel it will give it away, but I would recommend the DVD version and NOT the VHS. Why? There is also autobiogrpahy of the director of this movie who is also the lead actress. It explains why she made this movie in the first place. However the reason why I give this movie 4 stars and not 5, because I expected a little more. Although, she shows how women must be covered head to toe and there's a scene that shows of a mother who cannot work and is in much grief because of the rules- this is really all we get from what's going on inside of Afganistan. So with that, I am a little disappointed However the film is beautiful in all respect and I would recommend anyone to see it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Journey into an unknown world!
Review: I saw this film when it opened here in Houston, and I just loved it. Kandahar is a deep journey into the unknown world of Afghanistan, being that it was unknown to the West for a very long time. It is the journey of a woman that returns to this world when she finds out that her sister is about to commit suicide. A rediscovery of the past and a realization of the present, Kandahar does not only show the horrors, the different mentalities of the afghan people, the culture, and the precarious condition of women and women's rights, but it also shows the personal and intimate journey of this woman, Nafas, into the world she left behind years ago, into herself, and into the injustices and obstacles that she encounters every step she takes. Beautiful and emotional scenery, colorful burquas and bracelets, and the cleverness of a great director make Kandahar one of the best movies that I have seen in my entire life. And the most important thing, I believe, is that Kandahar is a movie about hope, a desperate cry for hope of the people, especially the women, of Afghanistan. Nafas never stops her journey to Kandahar to find her sister, she persists and will not stop until she finds her. A journey of hope, a journey into an unknown world, a journey into deep sadness and hope, the hope of the women of Afghanistan is that one day they will be able to remove their burquas and let the rest of the world finally look at them once and for all.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely Important Movie for ALL
Review: I was in awe at the courage and honestly with which this film was made. Although some of the acting is less than desirable, the non-actors could not be more real. The beauty of the cinematography and Makhmalbauf's knack for color is contrasted by the dire poverty and hopelessness of the vast desert. You will not be disappointed! Run, don't walk to see this film.
Rating: 
Summary: An Unsatisfying Film on a Timely Topic
Review: It often seems that people who review movies that depict other cultures feel obliged to rate them highly, perhaps fearing that they will seem ignorant if they say they don't like it, or assuming that they are "missing" something special in the film because they lack cultural reference points. I have no such reservations, and I can say that this film is quite simply a clunker.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf is a thoroughly mature, highly competent film maker, and along with Majid Majidi, a real innovator in the world of contemporary Iranian film. With this film, however, he decided to step away from his usual style of powerful character development, beautiful photography, and an interesting way of integrating the universal qualities of human culture with the particular world view of modern Iran.
Kandahar is a film that disappoints on many different levels. The character development is so poor in this film, that it is hard to empathize with much of what is going on on screen. A lot of this has to do with the writing for the film, which is simply awful. A good example of how bad this script is can be heard in the speech that the black American doctor gives into the reporter's recorder. Depth is attempted, but only pseudo-gravitas is achieved. Also, the acting in this film is inexplicably, inexcusably, and often hilariously atrocious. Amateur casts can be excellent and convincing, as they have been in films by Makhmalbaf and Majidi before, but in Kandahar, it is so bad as to be a distraction, and only serves to point up the defincies in character development and the inanity of the dialogue.
This film is also much praised for the beauty of its scenery, but it is not a National Geographic Special, it is a feature film that introduces a plot, introduces characters, and ostensibly seeks to develop them. The scenery certainly is nice, but it doesn't make up for the dramatic failure of the film, and honestly, the production values in this film are average if not a little below average. And when you finally get right down to it, it is not much of an achievement to point a camera at a mountain or a desert in Eastern Iran or Western Afghanistan. It is just unfamiliar to most viewers (or at least it was before the fall of the Taliban), and that seems to make the scenery more special than it really is. I suppose a case could be made for the harsh terrain reflecting the harsh life under the Taliban, but that is hardly a new idea in film making, and the amount of time that this film spends lingering over the mountains and deserts of Central Asia really does absolutely nothing for a film that is just begging to be developed. Also, fanciful images in the film such as the oft-mentioned prosthetic legs flying out of the airplane, or a young Afghani pulling the ring off of a skeleton seem pretentious in the context of such a thin plot and lack of fundamental dramatic development.
In this film Makhmalbaf tried something new, and he simply failed. Luckily for him, the film became instantly relevant due to the 9/11 attacks, and it received far more praise than it should have. I liken the critical response to this film to that of "A Time for Drunken Horses", a better film than "Kandahar", but one that also gets more recognition for WHAT it is, than what it achieves as a work of cinematic art.
Rating:
Summary: Oppression of women under Taliban rule...
Review: Kandahar is a semi-documentary about Nafas, a female reporter exiled from Afghanistan and residing in Canada. Her journey takes her into Afghanistan and the city of Kandahar during the Taliban rule. Her reason to get to Kandahar is to save her sister who has communicated that she intends to commit suicide during the next solar eclipse. Her sister could not escape with the family to Canada, since she lost her legs to a landmine in their attempt to escape the country. Now Nafas wants to get back to Afghanistan and save her sister; however, on the road to Kandahar she faces the true rule of the Taliban and understands the misfortune of the people and her sister in Afghanistan. Kandahar is an exceptionally personal film in many aspects. For example, Nafas is constantly defenseless, since she must put her trust into people she does not know, and this builds up a strong connection between Nafas and the audience. In addition, many scenes cause the audience to ponder why Nafas's sister would consider suicide. In the end, this film builds up a plethora of insights of how life might have been in Afghanistan during the Taliban rule and how women might be suffering around the world.
Rating:
Summary: Oppression of women under Taliban rule...
Review: Kandahar is a semi-documentary about Nafas, a female reporter exiled from Afghanistan and residing in Canada. Her journey takes her into Afghanistan and the city of Kandahar during the Taliban rule. Her reason to get to Kandahar is to save her sister who has communicated that she intends to commit suicide during the next solar eclipse. Her sister could not escape with the family to Canada, since she lost her legs to a landmine in their attempt to escape the country. Now Nafas wants to get back to Afghanistan and save her sister; however, on the road to Kandahar she faces the true rule of the Taliban and understands the misfortune of the people and her sister in Afghanistan. Kandahar is an exceptionally personal film in many aspects. For example, Nafas is constantly defenseless, since she must put her trust into people she does not know, and this builds up a strong connection between Nafas and the audience. In addition, many scenes cause the audience to ponder why Nafas's sister would consider suicide. In the end, this film builds up a plethora of insights of how life might have been in Afghanistan during the Taliban rule and how women might be suffering around the world.
Rating: 
Summary: Kandahar
Review: Set in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Kandahar follows the quest of Nafas (Niloufar Pazira) to illegally reenter the country three days before her sister -- whose legs were blown off by a landmine years earlier -- can carry out an intended suicide during the last eclipse of the 20th century. During her arduous trek through the war-torn wastes, Nafas encounters four distinct guides, each representing a different atrocity plaguing modern day Afghanistan: a defeated Afghan refugee; a fatherless young boy expelled from an Islamic religious school; an African-American militant turned healer; and a one-handed thief who claims to be the victim of a landmine accident. These encounters turn out to be the most structurally sound elements of an otherwise disjointed and unsatisfying narrative. The story is based on journalist Pazira's own unsuccessful attempt to reach a friend in Afghanistan after the Taliban took power. But the film is considerably less successful as a fictional odyssey through a harsh and hostile environment than it is as an exploration of modern war-ravaged Afghanistan. Substituting Iranian for Afghanistan desertscapes, director of photography Ebrahim Ghafouri captures stunning and indelible images, the most impressive coming when a group of legless men race on crutches to retrieve parachuting artificial legs dropped from a Red Cross helicopter. But director Makhmalbaf's lack of closure regarding the plot is frustrating -- we never learn whether Nafas ever reaches Kandahar and saves her sister. If the entire point is -- contrived from information gleaned via the closing frame -- that all of Afghanistan has been under an eclipse since the Taliban arrived, fine. But it needs clearer delineation to have the necessary punch so that audiences don't have to be left guessing as to what the ultimate point of the movie is, other than one of oppressed futility. The film runs a scant 85 minutes, so this was obviously an intentional decision, perhaps meant to reflect the ambiguity of international press regarding the conditions within Afghanistan (pre-September 11th). Yet Kandahar isn't a documentary, it's a feature film by one of Iran's foremost directors, and as such one would have hoped that the staging and acting were up to Makhmalbaf's usual standards. Sadly, the murky conclusion hampers an otherwise fascinating and utterly disquieting look at a place alien to many Westerners who up until recently couldn't have cared less about its people or politics.
Rating:
Summary: A journey in the land of Taliban horror and oppression
Review: This Iranian film was made before the horrible events of 9/11 etched the name of Kandahar into our consciousness. This film is NOT a documentary. It is a fictionalized story of an Afghan woman, Nafas, a Canadian journalist, who returns to Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban to search for her sister. Filmed in Iran, it nevertheless gives us a feel for the bleak sun-dried landscape of Afghanistan. Here, the woman wear burkas, they are not allowed to go to school, and they must constantly look out for land mines. During the course of the film Nafas has disguises herself as a fourth wife of a man returning to Afghanistan from Iran, is helped by a young boy who has to eke out a living the best way he can after being thrown out of a religious school, sickens and meets a doctor who speaks English and joins a one-armed man and a group of women on their way to a wedding in Kandahar. There is horror and oppression everywhere, not just for the women, but also for everyone under Taliban rule. Saddest of all are the victims of the land mines. There are several scenes in a Red Cross station about this, with the dozens of one-legged men who are in constant pain and who wait for the helicopters to drop prosthetic legs from the sky. Nelofer Pazura, a real-life Canadian journalist who was born in Kabul and therefore speaks both Parsi and English, plays the part of Nafas. She is beautiful with wide sad blue eyes and she plays this role as if in a dream, her face expressionless whenever she lifts her burka. The film is upsetting and not for everyone and some of the images will haunt me for a long time. I do recommend it. But don't expect to leave the theater smiling.
Rating:
Summary: nowhere movie in nowhere land
Review: This is a hopeless movie, totally lacking in dramatic development and tediously relentless in its depiction of the hopelessness of life under the Taliban. I admire the determination of other Amazon reviewers to find this film worthwhile. But I cannot agree with them. There are one or two good scenes (primarily those involving an African-American posing as a doctor), but a few good moments and some fine photography simply do not make a good movie.
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