Mir in the documentary "The Boy Mir: 10 Years in Afghanistan."
By MIKE HALE
Published: August 11, 2011
In 2002 Phil Grabsky went to Afghanistan and made “The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan,” a documentary about a year in the life of Mir, an 8-year-old with boundless energy and a blinding smile. His family, dislocated by war, lived in grinding poverty in a cave near where the Taliban had destroyed centuries-old stone Buddhas; the family granted Mr. Grabsky an alarming degree of access, and the resulting film had a sharp focus, a fluid rhythm and a touch of strange beauty, abetted by the towering cliffs with their empty alcoves for statues.
More About This Movie
Mr. Grabsky returned and documented Mir’s life through his teenage years, a noble endeavor that has resulted in an interesting but much more ordinary sequel, “The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan.” The first 22 minutes of the new film is footage from the earlier one, so drastically edited that it feels slightly surreal if you’ve seen the original. The story then picks up in 2005, with Mir back in his peaceful home village in the north.
Over the next five years he dips in and out of school, acquires and neglects a bicycle and a motorcycle, weathers his parents’ increasingly exasperated complaints and hopes he won’t have to join the army. Despite the abject conditions and the not-so-distant war, his story starts to feel like a typical rebellious-teenager narrative. And the compressed time frame means there is less of the acute observation that distinguished “The Boy Who Plays” and more scenes of the family members, now practiced performers, talking to the camera. Still, if you’ve seen the first film, you’ll want to come back to see Mir’s progress through life. And no matter what happens, it seems, the smile remains.
THE BOY MIR
Ten Years in Afghanistan
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Phil Grabsky; directors of photography, Mr. Grabsky and Shoaib Sharifi; edited by Phil Reynolds; music by Richard Durrant; produced by Mr. Grabsky and Amanda Wilkie; released by Seventh Art Productions. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. In Dari, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. This film is not rated.
Source,
http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/movies/the-boy-mir-by-phil-grabsky-review.html
No comments:
Post a Comment