Samira Makhmalbaf has been making waves internationally with “At Five in The Afternoon”, a film that garnered accolades at film festivals around the world. The daughter of the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who wrote the script, Samira depends on the spontaneity and responsiveness of amateur actors, preferring the qualities that “real” people can bring to her storytelling.
The heroine of “At Five in the Afternoon” is a young Afghan woman, Aqeela Ridai, a mother of two whom Samira met while she was in Afghanistan.
The movie revolves around events in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taleban.
The movie’s heroine dreams of a political future and even running for the presidency. She tries to find out how elections campaigns are conducted in democratic countries. Her questions bring her in contact with many others including French peacekeepers The film focuses on the challenges she experiences from the moment she decides to take off her burqa. Samira, in the slow journey of her heroine, tries to raise social, political and personal questions about women generally and women in Afghanistan in particular. The film may seem simple, almost naïve at times, but it is through the simplicity of the production that the reality of a woman’s life and her human relations and the beauty of the scenery are revealed.
“At Five in the Afternoon” is Samira’s third feature film. Her first movie was “The Apple” in 1997, when she was only 18 years old. “The Apple” focused on two 11-year-old girls who are locked up in the house in Tehran by their father who is unable to take care of them or provide them with the bare necessities because their mother has become an invalid. Conflicts between social workers, who demand that the girls be institutionalized, and the father who insists that they stay with him provide the drama of the movie. Samira’s first film already saw her launched on her preoccupation with women and children in a manner combining the symbolic with the actual. She always chooses a plain tale that exemplifies the larger social and political picture.
In her second movie, “The Blackboard”, she follows a group of simple country teachers who move around carrying their blackboard on their back, going from village to village to teach children reading and writing. The teachers meet a group of Iraqi Kurds near the Iran-Iraq borders who long to return to their hometown in Iraq.
Through the eyes of the teachers we become acquainted with the life in remote villages and the dangers and risks the refugees face.
The movie brings together spontaneous performances from the amateur cast which bring out both the humor and tragedy of the events. The dogged determination of the teacher is particularly moving.
There is hope at the end of “The Apple”, the immigrants in at the end of “The Blackboard” fail to recognize their hometown in the smoke and wreckage of war, leaving the audience with a sense of a future that is essentially obscure.
Samira’s own future has always looked bright. Despite being an excellent student left school at 15 to accompany her father on his movie-shoots. She later attended the film school her father founded in 1996 after producing 14 feature films, three short films and 24 books. He had also been an editor on 22 films over a 22-year period.
The school offers a four-year course to only eight carefully selected students each year. Among the school’s graduates is Samira Murdhia Shakni, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s second wife, who produced the movie “The Day I Became A Woman” in 2000.
The school also helped father movies like “The Silence” in 1998 and “The Door” in 1990. The Makhmalbafs may seem a family industry, but each of them has their own individual style. Samira says she is proud of her father’s artistic influence and says he taught her to follow her own mind, to develop a strong personality and take on the challenges and difficulties in her work and her life head-on.
