![]() Wahidy’s resilient feminist stance makes her the most compelling of the film’s otherwise male quartet of principal interviewees, though all four are lucid and thoughtful on the subject of their own craft and its larger place in the political sphere. (At one point, Wahidy pages through a book of 1970s street photography in Kabul, marveling at the liberated nature of the women in focus.) Abuse like this drove the young woman to a career of documenting such oppression as extensively and vividly as possible, making up for those darkened years that saw the social status and education of Afghan women compromised in drastic, as-yet-unrecovered fashion. Happily, Bombach and Scarpelli (both first-time feature helmers, which is hardly obvious from the polished presentation here) listen as intently as they look: Photographer Farzana Wahidy, who spent her teens under the regime, relates with heart-stopping clarity the experience of being beaten in the street by adult men for the perceived crime of not wearing a burqa. Words, then, must solely account for the harrowing injustices of that period. Title cards at the film’s outset offer auds a potted history of Afghanistan’s tumultuous governmental shifts since the Soviet invasion of 1979, obviously with particular emphasis on the Taliban’s punishing rule from 1996 to 2001 - during which time all photography was declared illegal. ![]() “If a country is without photography, it is without identity,” says one of the shutterbugs interviewed in “Frame by Frame.” It’s a statement that might sound vaguely, worthily platitudinous if the country in question were not Afghanistan, where residents can recall first-hand the disabling effect of living in a photo-free society, and the blind eye turned by many outsiders to troubles they can’t physically see. Already justly well-traveled on the festival circuit, the pic will continue to move auds as it begins a limited U.S. As its subjects’ images probe unhealed schisms of gender, faith and privilege in a country still hostile to liberal journalism, Alexandria Bombach and Mo Scarpelli’s film in turn proves the alternately confrontational and cathartic power of the camera lens. Both levels of visual expression are shown to be essential in “Frame by Frame,” a piercing, poignant and - as befits its subject - beautifully composed exploration of the challenges and responsibilities faced by photojournalists in Afghanistan’s post-Taliban free press. ![]() A picture may say a thousand words, but it doesn’t have to: For every photograph in which closer investigation yields narrative upon narrative, there’s another with a message as immediate and urgent as an involuntary cry of pain.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |