Kandahar

Nafas, a Canadian journalist who left Afghanistan as a child, receives a letter from her sister: she will kill herself at the last solar eclipse. Nafas crosses from the Iranian border and tries to reach Kandahar to find her. The journey takes days and at every stage she depends on someone else. Mohsen Makhmalbaf wrote and directed. The film was shot in the border regions during Taliban rule, with most of the cast non-professional and some of them genuinely refugees. Its best-known scene has prosthetic legs dropped by parachute for mine victims and men on crutches running toward them across the desert. The image is not invented; it rests on a real practice. The telling sits between documentary and fiction; the plot is thin and deliberately so. It screened at Cannes in 2001 and drew extraordinary international attention after September of that year. Who it is for: viewers who like political cinema and documentary-textured storytelling. Who it is not for: anyone wanting dramatic structure; the film is deliberately loose.