Love & Death, and the Choice to Elude Tragedy

A Commentary & Review of “The Swallows of Kabul”
by John Bennison, Mountain Shadow Director

A wise teacher once told me that a sad story only becomes a true tragedy when the characters in such a tale fail to grasp the opportunity to somehow redeem the situation. Things may still go very badly. But the larger story can elude becoming deemed as tragic, depending upon the choices one makes; holding fast to what one cherishes most in life.

For example, consider film craft.The power of cinema as the primary modern medium for storytelling may well have the capacity to portray sad, dismal or even depressing situations. but keeping a story from descending into tragedy is sometimes found in a single character ascending aloft and above it all. Like, say, a swallow in flight. Such is the case with this extraordinary new feature-length animated film.

When I viewed “The Swallows of Kabul” last month on a Sunday morning at the Mill Valley Film Festival the theater was three-quarters empty. Who would want to spend a glorious Autumn morning in a dark, half-deserted room; watching a feature-length cartoon about the brutal and barbaric Taliban regime in such a dismal and depressing place as Kabul, Afghanistan?

As one of the two directors explains herself (at right), had the screen play that was written from the novel by the same name been filmed with live characters instead of watercolor pastels, it would have been too gruesome for some viewers, including myself. But emerging out of the theater at the end of this screening seemed to make the sun shine even brighter.

Its’s Summer, 1998, and Kabul is under Taliban rule. Zunaira and Mohsen are young and in love. They met at the university, when such a place and possibility still existed. She’s an artist who sketches in secrecy, while listening to decadent Western music. He wants to teach history. They once enjoyed going to the cinema. But that was all before the daily violence and misery of their present circumstances. Still, they hope for a better future. One day, a foolish gesture, followed by the unintended consequences of a flash of anger, cause life to take an irrevocable turn.

Meanwhile, their doubles are portrayed by an older couple, Mussarat and her husband, Atiq. The young lovers are full of dreams for their future. The older couple is faced with some of the ordinary life challenges that eventually come along for mortal beings. As things unfold, the fate of the two couples will become intertwined in circumstances that will prove to be both liberating and fatal.

Mussarat is ill, and blaming herself for being unable to be a good wife. Atiq is the jailer for women incarcerated for committing unforgivable crimes of immorality and awaiting execution. It is a social order ruled not only by custom, but a suffocating form of religious fanaticism; where swallows are used for target practice, while men debate whether it’s barbaric to stone the condemned to death, instead of just shooting them.

At first glance, to a Western way of thinking, one might want to stretch one’s wings when the film’s final scene concludes; grateful to be who we are, living where we do.

But the swallows inm Kabul present us with many of those underlying themes and life events that are common, universal and eternal to our human story.

Whether we choose to make our story a tragedy or not is ultimately up to us. jb