Kabul, City in the Wind (2018)

Directed by: Aboozar Amini | 88 minutes | documentary

‘10% peace’, has known his life so far, says bus driver Abbas – one of the protagonists in this documentary, opening film of the IDFA in 2018. He ‘steers his rickety bus through the chaos of Kabul regularly hit by attacks. Further on in the same gray city shrouded in a permanent cloud of dust, the young teenager Afshin and his little brother Benjamin are taken by their father, an ex-serviceman, to a memorial with portraits of bomb victims’.

In this razor-sharp filmed city chronicle, Aboozar Amini alternately follows the bus driver and the two brothers, in the slow pace of a city where people survive instead of living. They look remarkably well dressed. While Kabul has a harsh continental climate, with long hot summers and long cold winters, when the brothers and Abbas look directly at the camera, they even look a bit stylized – the great risk of such interventions. It is not really disturbing, because what is authenticity if there is a camera crew after you? It also has something of dignity in it, but at the same time it is contradictory: the lives of these people are just so aimless and a documentary should not become an Oxfam Novib spot.

Even the trees of Kabul are watered; playing football with a tin can in dusty alleys, a small child still does it with zest for life, a teenager no longer. He is already tired of the lack of perspective, or so it seems. Amini does not intervene further with narrative elements. We follow the boys in their daily lives – just like the bus driver, a jovial man driven by his profession. Kabul appears to be a somewhat rural nomadic city, with a multiracial population; sometimes we see Asian features, then again strongly Arab in Abbas’s bus. You wish these people an American dream: accelerate and go. It is not stardust, however, that circulates in Kabul’s sea of ​​houses, but scree – debris from decades of conflict.