Afghan Star

From repression to expression: ‘Afghan Star’ offers a powerful look at post-Taliban talent show performers

July 31, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

“Afghan Star,’’ the TV show, is exactly what “American Idol’’ would look like if the contestants were playing for the biggest stakes imaginable: political and social freedom, gender equality, a chance to heal a country 30 years under the yokes of war and religious dictatorship. “Afghan Star,’’ the documentary about that TV show, is one of the most hopeful and heart-rending movies I’ve seen this year.

The governing irony is that one culture’s pop junk is another’s salvation. When the Taliban were taken out of power in 2001, it was no longer a punishable crime in Afghanistan to watch TV, dance, or listen to popular music. Women could sing in public without being whipped. As broadcast networks blossomed, Tolo TV built “Afghan Star’’ explicitly on the “American Idol’’ model. Even more explicitly, the producers used the contest to promote a national, inter-ethnic unity. “Our aim is to take people’s minds from weapons to music,’’ says the show’s host, Daoud Sediqi, a Ryan Seacrest with actual gravitas.

The movie, which won directing and audience awards at this year’s Sundance, follows the show’s third season, launched in October 2007, and focuses on four contestants from the more than 2,000 who auditioned. Two are women, which in itself is remarkable: Setara Hussainzada from Herat and Lima Sahar from Kandahar. The latter describes taking singing lessons in secret, hiding her music books and computer from the Taliban.

Lima accepts her new freedoms gingerly, in contrast to the more impetuous Setara, who causes a national scandal when she dances and lets her head-covering slip during a televised performance. To the home audience, it’s the equivalent of Sinead O’Connor ripping up a picture of the Pope.

Setara doesn’t really want to be the Courtney Love of Afghanistan. She just wants to express herself with a youthful passion for which her countrymen (and women) aren’t ready. The fallout from her performance is brutal, raging from shocked disavowals to overt death threats. In these scenes, filmmaker Havana Marking shows a country struggling to redefine itself after decades of repression. How much freedom is too much? Some of it? Any of it?

The men have it much easier. Kabul’s Hameed Sakhizada and Rafi Naabzada, from Mazar-i-Sharif, are both young and pretty, westernized without being Western. They each wield massive followings who back their respective boys with the fervor of British football fans or our own Red Sox Nation. For all intents and purposes, they’re both Kris Allen, yet each of them has an awareness of what they mean to a society struggling to its feet. “This country was like a house that no one was living in,’’ says Rafi, implying that the lights are coming on again, one by one.