David Empey

I watched the film Osama tonight. It is about an Afghan girl who, during the Taliban years, is forced to pretend to be a boy to support her family. The film very vividly shows us what life was like for women in Afghanistan at the time.

The film mercifully avoids anything terribly graphic, but it doesn’t need it. I don’t want to give anything away, but listen to the comments made by the wives of the mullah near the end of the film. Their voices and words tell us more than graphic depictions ever could.

While this film is fiction (so far as I know), it (like Bangkok Girl about which I’ve written before) draws us into the lives of the characters very successfully. It is difficult not to come away from the film both furious and sad.

On the other hand, the film does something else very important. It points out that ordinary Afghan citizens – including men – did not share the Taliban’s radical ideology. Many of the men in the film are victims of the Taliban in their own way. Those ordinary citizens are no one's enemy, and never were.

This is something we often forget when dealing with extremists.