The visit to the USSR stimulates a chess competition in the orphanage

Shahrbanoo Sadat’s third film as a writer-director was screened in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2019, following her well-received Wolf and Sheep which won an award at Cannes in 2016. The Orphanage is currently streaming on MUBI. Sadat is a young Afghan director based in Denmark and her films are part of the general trend towards European-backed films from various Asian territories, enabling new directors to create festival films and a foothold in the international film market, even when the infrastructure may not be available for features in their home country.

The Orphanage is set in Russian occupied Kabul in 1988. Qodrat has been sleeping in an abandoned car and hustling outside a cinema, selling key-rings and acting as a ticket tout. We see him in the audience for Shahenshah (India 1988), an Amitabh Bachchan starrer. The male crowd is enjoying Amitabh’s superior fighting skills and singing along to a dance sequence. But somebody has perhaps complained about being cheated by Qodrat and he is picked up by Russians who put him in an orphanage. He later tells the authorities that he is 15 and that he has a mother but that his father is dead. At first sight the orphanage appears a relatively laid-back institution, especially in comparison with the Iranian orphanage in the film Son-Mother (Iran-Czech Republic 2019) that I saw earlier this year at the Glasgow Film Festival.

One of Qodrat’s Hindi cinema fantasies sees him in the sidecar with his pal on the motorbike

Qodratollah Qadiri, the actor who plays Qodrat also appeared in Sadat’s previous film. The camera certainly likes him and he makes an attractive lead character. Having said that, The Orphanage is not a conventional youth picture and, though Qodrat is the lead, the narrative does focus on a number of other characters, almost in a documentary style presentation of the orphanage before returning to Qodrat’s perspective. His unique vision is on four occasions presented in fantasy sequences which transport the scene he is witnessing into familiar Hindi cinema set pieces with a careful music track matching late 1980s action and romance films. These are entertaining but what is their meaning? They appear to work to emphasise the way in which Afghan youths like Qodrat must try to survive the dangers of their changing environments when they lack any clear understanding of what is actually happening. I’m not sure the fantasy sequences ‘work’ but they certainly offer something different and they feel ‘authentic’ as a response. It seems unlikely that Sadat will have seen Lindsay Anderson’s if . . . . (1968) but that film includes similar sequences in a British ‘public school’ setting.

Girls to meet in the classroom

Because events are seen from the perspective of Qodrat and the other young people in the orphanage, there is no attempt to explain the major events in Kabul as such. Qodrat and many of the other young people don’t speak Russian, yet announcements are often made in Russian and at one point the girls and boys of the orphanage are flown to Moscow and taken to a pioneer camp. The boys are awkward around the girls and fantasise about some of the female teachers. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the film for me was the relatively liberal feel of the orphanage and the school (it’s not clear if the orphanage is part of the school or vice versa) and the general representation of Russian administrators. The young people seem to have quite a lot of freedom to play football, swim in the river, explore their environs etc. They are well fed and they are offered education (though the script seems a bit hazy on this – Qodrat is deemed to be ‘uneducated’ by his own admission, but he seems able to cope with reading and writing). The only downside seems to be the building next door which houses ‘crazy people’ (as the subtitles translate the dialogue and the credits list the players), possibly suffering from forms of PTSD. The narrative ends at the point when the Russians suddenly leave and the mujahideen occupy Kabul.

A Sikh boy in the school shows his hair platting technique

The answers to most of my questions about the film are in the statement provided by the director on the MUBI website:

While working on The Orphanage, I was fighting with two clichés. One ‘orphanage’ and the other ‘Afghanistan’.  I wanted to show an orphanage where my best friend Anwar Hashimi lived for almost eight years during the years 1984-1992 in Kabul.
The orphanage I wanted to talk about was not one of those orphanages that we see in movies or we read about in books, where children are starving or having a really miserable life, and they get beaten and have to work. It was the opposite.
Sadat eventually persuaded Anwar Hashimi to play the role of the Afghan ‘supervisor’ of the orphanage, the father figure who looks after his charges with compassion. She also details the sheer hard work of organising the shoot which took place in Tajikistan, Germany and Denmark as well bringing actors from Aghanistan. Anwar Hashimi has written an 800 page autobiography, as yet unpublished, and Sadat has now completed two films drawing on the text. She envisages three more.
Shahrbanoo Sadat has worked consistently with a group of other women on her films including producer Katja Adomeit, cinematographer Virginie Surdej and editor Alexandra Strauss. I enjoyed the film very much and I’m grateful for the background information which helps me in understanding what the film is trying to say. Most of all, it’s good to have an Afghani filmmaker’s take on the personal lives of Afghanis who have lived through so much. I’ve seen several films by ‘outsiders’ from France, Iran, UK and Denmark and this one certainly feels different. The film is on MUBI for another 25 days, so if you have access I strongly advise you to take a look.