Afghan's film puts Taliban rule in focus

KABUL, Afghanistan - A new film with the eye-catching title Osama stars an illiterate girl found begging in the streets of Kabul who plays a girl posing as a boy so she can work.

It's the time of the Taliban; the men in her family are dead and women cannot leave home unless accompanied by male relatives.

The movie is the first feature film made by an Afghan since the ouster of the hard-line Islamic regime two years ago. It has been honored at several international film festivals and has worked wonders for its young star, Marina Golbahari.

Soon after Kabul was liberated, Afghan director Siddiq Barmak, 41, returned from Pakistan determined to make a film about the abuses his countrymen suffered under the Taliban and its ally, Osama bin Laden.

Wandering through the ruined capital, he found Marina, a street child begging for food. He asked her if anyone in her family had died during Afghanistan's 23 years of war.

"I said two of my sisters were killed when a wall in a building fell on them, and I began to cry," Marina, now 15, recalled in an interview. "They hired me to play the main character in the movie, even though I couldn't read and write."

She has used the money she made from Osama and its awards to buy her parents a four-bedroom mud home. She studies at a school run by Aschiana, a relief agency.

The movie tells the story of a girl who is being raised by her mother and her grandmother in Kabul during the Taliban regime.

Years of warfare have killed the family's men, and the regime's rules bar women from working outside the house or walking the streets without being covered head to toe in a burqa and accompanied by a male relative.

As a last-ditch effort, the family cuts the girl's hair and dresses her as a boy so she can work in a shop.

That lasts until the Taliban enroll the city's boys in a religious school and training camp allied with al-Qaida. There, some boys question the masculinity of Marina's character. She is saved by a boy who tells the others her name is Osama, a name everyone fears, but eventually her identity is discovered.

"I wanted to make a film that focuses on why simple people suddenly fall for the rule of extremists acting in the name of religion," Barmak said. "It also tries to answer the question: Who are the people behind these dirty political games, these tricks?"

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