Siddiq Barmak’s Osama is a fictional film that pivots around the fate of a small Afghani girl. The sense of fate, of a life at the mercy of forces it cannot control, is important. What we see, we see through the eyes of this girl, or reflected in her mute expressions, or in the anxieties of those around her, and yet ... we never learn her name. There is an idea, still preserved in the beliefs of many religious traditions, which holds that an entity cannot be created, cannot come into being, until it is named. In a very real sense this idea seems to permeate every frame of Barmak’s Osama. The silent, sometimes uncomprehending gaze of this young Afghani girl not only creates a kind of receptor through which Barmak channels and expresses the suffering and hopelessness endured by Afghani women, but also forms the metaphorical equivalent of a much deeper oppression, an oppression which, in a very real sense, prevented women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan from coming into being. The Taliban will not let them work, and as many of their husbands have either been killed in the country’s past wars or are occupied fighting its present wars, these women have no way of sustaining themselves, no way of making money to buy food and no way of making their presence, or protest, or suffering felt. As soon as they do they are punished. Only their silence, their compliance, their absence, their namelessness, is tolerated. Thus, early in the film we witness a demonstration by Afghani women who are demanding that they be allowed to work. A young boy weaves through the crowd, trying to earn money by selling people "a prayer to keep misfortune away". He turns directly to the camera and offers to sell us one too. A hand comes from the side of the frame offering the boy an American dollar, for which he gladly sings his prayer. In this opening scene the camera is positioned as a character in the drama. When the Taliban come to break up the demonstration, the camera runs, hides. It watches as women are attacked, beaten and thrown into a cage on the back of a truck. A Taliban member looks into the lens of the camera and angrily runs up, hitting the lens with a stick. The camera falls over. From this point on Barmak doesn’t use this technique anymore, and at the end of the film it becomes clear why. We are at the weekly executions and a journalist is on trial for filming and watching the demonstrations. He is taken off and shot. Barmak wishes to use this technique to shift the audience from a sense of fiction to a sense of reality.

It is the denial of a woman’s right to work that leads the young girl’s mother and grandmother to cut her hair and dress her up as a boy. She is given the name ‘Osama’ and can now work in a shop, but as a boy, sh e must also study the Koran and train to fight with Osama bin Laden. Her new life and her new name, however, do not provide an identity through which she can express herself, nor do they provide the audience with a handle it can take hold of and relate to her through. On the contrary, her name and her life only function to hide her more deeply. Emotionally, this film oscillates between this young girl’s fear, and the ever present danger to which she is increasingly exposed as she moves from her job in the shop to a Taliban-run religious and military training camp for boys. She is, from beginning to end, a young girl denied her identity, robbed of her childhood, living in fear, exposed to danger, and finally condemned to a dismal fate that functions to confirm and underline the hopelessness of her situation.

Osama is a film whose closeness to recent reality will reduce many people to their own silence. Barmak’s film certainly succeeds in showing the miserable conditions that women endured in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. More even, the film seems very much constructed as a critique of the Taliban’s oppressive regime, and very much emphasizes and wishes to carry us to the emotional conclusion that there is no escape for these women. It is precisely here, however, that Barmak tends to undermine his own work. Our awareness that this regime is no longer in power renders the film’s emotional conclusion somewhat specious -- certainly weakened. Moreover, in watching this film we cannot escape such an awareness because Barmak’s very ability and freedom to make it function as a constant reminder that the political situation has in fact changed. The film does succeed in showing in detail what many Western audiences may only have known in general, that is, that women were brutally oppressed in Taliban-run Afghanistan. It didn’t succeed in carrying me to the emotional point to which Barmak wished to carry me. As I left the theatre, I couldn’t help replacing Barmak’s emotional endpoint with a question: What’s happening with women in Afghanistan now, today?