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There haven't been all that many films about Afghanistan. In the waning days of the Reagan era, when the mountains and deserts of that country proved as difficult for the Soviets as the jungles of Vietnam had been for the Americans, the land of the mujahideen was seen as a sort of mythic battlefield where Western agents like Rambo and James Bond could flex their heroic muscles in the name of freedom. A 1988 release, The Beast, showed Russian soldiers doubting the purpose of the brutal campaign. But for the most part, the image-makers of the West simply haven't been interested.

When Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf set out to make a film about the plight of Afghanistan under the Taliban, he could hardly have foreseen the circumstances under which it would be seen. Kandahar, which won the Ecumenical Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival, is an eye-opening look at the stifling conditions under which most Afghans have lived in recent years, and it provides an essential bit of background to the conflict that now rages there. Believing the title was too obscure to lure English-speaking audiences, the film's distributors initially planned to call it The Sun Behind the Moon for its release in the West, reflecting the fact that one of its central metaphors is a solar eclipse: the film begins by juxtaposing this image with that of a woman's face obscured under the shadow of her burqa. But the city after which the film is named is no longer unfamiliar to Western audiences.

Kandahar follows Nafas (Nelofer Pazira), an Afghan refugee turned Canadian journalist and political activist, as she sneaks back into the country of her birth in an attempt to prevent the suicide of her little sister, who has written that she intends to kill herself on the day of the impending eclipse. When the film begins, the eclipse is just three days away, and Nafas, who begins her journey in Iran, spends much of the film pleading with local Afghans to guide her to Kandahar, where her sister lives. Along the way, Nafas records her thoughts onto a tape for her sister and peers at the barren scenery from behind the embroidered veil of her burqa. She enters the country disguised as one of an old man's four wives, and at one point, he complains that she dishonors him by lifting her veil too often. When the man and his family are robbed and turn back, Nafas hires a boy named Khak (Sadou Teymouri) to take her closer to her sister's home.

Makhmalbaf uses this journey to explore the oppressive social realities that faced both women and men in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The wives of Nafas's first guide share makeup and jewelry, but even among themselves, each woman applies her cosmetics in secret, under the head-to-toe covering of her burqa. Women who need medical attention are examined through a curtain with a tiny hole that is barely big enough for the physician to shine a light in the woman's eye or place a depressor on her tongue—and when the doctor tells his patient to say "ah," he does not speak to her directly, but gives the message to her child, who sits at the edge of the curtain and repeats everything that both sides say. When Nafas herself becomes ill, she finds to her surprise that the nearest village doctor, Tabib Sahib (Hassan Tantai), is an African American who initially came to Afghanistan to join the fight against the Russians. He, too, must wear a disguise; although he cannot grow a beard, the law says he must have one, so he glues an artificial set of whiskers to his chin.

Everywhere Nafas goes, she is surrounded by reminders of the violence that has plagued her native land. A girl reminds her not to pick up any dolls that she finds on the ground, because they might be rigged to explode. Boys in school learn to describe the destructive power of sabres and Kalashnikovs as though they were reciting passages from the Qur'an. And of course, there are the many amputees who have been wounded by the land mines left over from the wars in Afghanistan. Nafas's last guide is a man who lost his forearm; when the Red Cross workers tell him they don't have any prosthetic hands, he hectors them into giving him a pair of legs instead. The film's most distinctive image may be the sight of one-legged men hopping on crutches across a lunar landscape to retrieve the prosthetic limbs dropped by parachute.

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