SIFF Review: Earth and Ashes

One of the best things about attending a film festival is the opportunity to see films that portray other cultures, offering snapshots of life from a perspective we never see in our ordinary lives. It's hard to remember, living as we do amid the hustle and bustle of our busy American urban and suburban lives, that our realities, the problems we face in our day to day living, are not problems faced in other parts of the world.

It's easy to take for granted the little things - the ability to turn on a faucet and get water when we are thirsty; to go to the refrigerator or to a store to get food for a hungry child; to get where we need to go by car, or by bus, or by taxi; to get in touch quickly with a loved one by picking up a cell phone or shooting off an email; to go to sleep each night not worrying whether our home, our town, our family, will go up in smoke and flames while we sleep.

Earth and Ashes, directed by Atiq Rahimi and based on his book by the same name, takes us to a world so different from the world we are used to, that just to watch it is an exercise in culture shock. 

Earth and Ashes is a journey tale and, like many journey tales, it's more about how you get to your destination than what you find at the end. The film takes place in the Afghanistan desert in a country officially liberated from Taliban rule, but still living within the reality of land mines exploding underfoot and whole villages and families being wiped out in a single moment.

Within this landscape of endless barren sand dunes and scrub brush, like the human inhabitants, struggling against the odds to survive, we are introduced to Dastaguir (Abdul Ghani), a stately old man, who is traveling by foot with his small grandson, Yassin (Jawad Mard Homayoun, in a remarkable performance). Why Dastaguir and Yassin are journeying through the desert by foot, and the events that preceded their journey, are revealed slowly. This is not an action movie, and the details of the story are not served at a drive-through window with a biggie-sized order of fries.

The Afghani desert is a place that seems like a slice of ancient history preserved with living inhabitants. Time moves more slowly here. The bridge guard in the film, who doesn't know the time because his watch is broken, and who tells Dastaguir, in response to his repeated inquiries about when the truck that goes to the mine is expected, shrugs and responds, "Who knows? It comes when it comes." Like the truck, the fullness of the story is revealed slowly, at its own pace; it gets you to the final destination, but on its own terms. I found it interesting that this film, spoken in Farsi and set in the Afghani desert, forces fast-paced Westerners watching it to slow down and watch on its own terms.

Of course, this being a film set in post 9/11 Afghanistan, there are political overtones. The people in the film are living amidst an ancient culture, swathed in rules and traditions obscure to most Westerners watching the film, yet they have been irrevocably impacted by a war waged with modern weapons. An abandoned tank which occupies a place on the screen for much of the film, sits like a sleeping sphinx in the middle of an isolated desert, empty save for the guard shack and a small grocery stand run by the kindly and talkative storekeeper Mirza Qadir, a man with his own sense of mystery, played with excellent effect by Walli Tallosh.

In the shade of the tank sits a shrouded woman, presumably a widow of the war, and her young daughter. No one knows why they are there or what they are waiting for; every day a jeep comes and drops them off, every day, all day, they sit in the shade of the tank, and every night the jeep picks them back up.

Human scavengers scour the desert for the corpses of animals that have been killed by abandoned landmines. The explosion of landmines sounds offscreen throughout the film, as wandering sheep hit them and are killed. When they hear a landmine go off, the scavengers praise God for the gift of food given to them and drive across the desert in their truck to retrieve it.

This film is full of metaphor and symbolism. The old man's grandson, Yassin, is but one metaphor woven into the fabric of this complex film. Yassin lost his hearing in the bombing that destroyed his village, killing his mother, his grandmother, and everyone he knew. But he doesn't realize he's gone deaf - he thinks the rest of the world has gone mute, their voices stolen by the tanks. Yassin spends the movie searching for the voices that have been taken from him. He is a child of war, a child of tragedy, and yet, in so many ways, he is no different from any Western child - picking up a stick to run it along a fence, playing in the abandoned tank, demanding his apple back when his grandfather takes it to cut it for him; driving his grandfather crazy, and always running off and making his grandfather miss catching the truck that will take him to the mine where his son works.

The boy's deafness isn't revealed at first, and only later in the film, when you realize the child lost his hearing in the attack that killed his family, do you realize the significance of the little moments: the stick, popping along the fence posts; the explosions of the landmines; the boy talking in a loud voice and igoring his grandfather when he calls him, all make sense when the old man reveals that the child is deaf.

Dastaguir is traveling to the mine where his son works, to deliver to him the message that his wife, Zaynab, and mother have been killed. The first day, Dastaguir and Yassin wait all day for the truck, finally decide to walk to the mine, and then miss the truck as it passes them. They walk to a nearby village - the village where Yassin's mother's family lives, only to find as they arrive that it has just been destroyed in an attack. The only family member to survive is Zaynab's father. Dastaguir doesn't have the heart to tell him that his daughter has died as well.

Dastaguir struggles over whether to find his son and tell him what happened - he fears his son will go mad upon hearing his young wife was publicly dishonored before she died, his mother is dead, and his only son is now deaf. We presume, from flashbacks the old man has, that Zaynab, his daughter-in-law and Yassin's mother, killed herself by walking into the fire after being disgraced; and visions of Zaynab running naked through the desert haunt Dastaguir.

The SIFF Web site brands this film in the comedy and dark comedy categories, a choice I found odd given the overall dark nature of the film. There are a couple funny momemts, such as when a traveling peddlar gives the deaf child a wooden rattle, which the child then rattles in his grandfather's ears, and then declares to the peddlar that it is broken, because he can't hear the noise. There are some moments that seem funny early on - Yassin talking about the tanks stealing the voices - until you realize the child lost his hearing in the attack.

Mostly, this film has a sense of quiet despair - the despair of a grandfather whose heart has been broken "into a thousand pieces" by the devastation of war; the child who has lost everyone save his grandfather and the father he never sees; the families fleeing their destroyed village with their few possessions strapped to their backs; the fathomless emptiness of the dusty desert, with only the occasional truck or burdened pack animal passing by. The child and his grandfather, endlessly walking, with no real destination, is perhaps saddest of all, for once they have reached the end of this journey and told Yassin's father of his loss, where will they go? There is safety nowhere - landmines abound in the desert, every village has either been destroyed or might be, and everywhere, thirst and hunger, grief and apathy, lie in wait.

Good film is, at the heart, about story, and the real power of story is the power to sweep the listener away into another reality. Earth and Ashes is a quietly powerful story, a film that carries us on the hot desert winds to a place where a simple tale of an old man and a boy reveals both our differences and the universal truths that unite us all across cultures. Dastaguir and Yassin are simple people living in the vast Afghani desert, but their loss and desperation, the bleakness of the future facing them, the bindings of a culture that both tie and comfort them, should give us pause as we ponder the differences that divide us, the commonalities that unite us, the meaningless of destruction, and the impact on real old men and small boys, of the politics of war.