Screening Report - Osama Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Screening Report - Osama - Essay Example In days when the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, Barmak, who headed the country’s ministry of film, was forced to flee Afghanistan, to Pakistan, where he lived until the Americans post 9/11 arrival and ousting of the terrorist regime.1 It is the director’s own personal history that is perhaps featured in the opening documentary-type moments of the film when a documentary filmmaker’s equipment is confiscated and the filmmaker is later executed.2 This particular scene serves as Barmak’s statement on creative censorship. Barmak knows what it is to be an exile from his country, to have fled in fear for his life, and to have witnessed the refugee camps where countless women and children, displaced from Afghanistan’s long history of war and turmoil, spend endless days and even years in the most horrific conditions of human existence.3 In fact, the Taliban, the terrorists who terrorize women and children in Barmak’s film, are themselves for the most part the product of Afghanistan’s war torn history and history of refugee camps. The members of the Taliban are largely the children of refugee camps during the past 20 years of war in that country.4 It is, then, no wonder that these men, having grown up in the horrors of the refugee camps, so aptly depicted in Barmak’s film, turned into monsters who turned to fundamentalism, just as their own lives had been extremes, and inflicted upon the people around them such pain and misery. This is an emotionally and politically charged film with themes that converge on a single issue of human rights versus the theocratic Islamic state. Very early in the film the theme of gender is introduced to the audience. Gender, male and female, is a dominant theme of the picture, as are family, the philosophy of faith and war, and especially the psychological impact of faith and war on the individual. Each of these themes are so important to the film that