JALALABAD, Afghanistan — In real life he’s a pharmacist, a polite young man who dispenses antibiotics and advice in a tiny Jalalabad shop barely 40 miles from where Osama bin Laden disappeared into the mountains.
But when evening falls, and Zhaid Khan shuts the pharmacy’s gates, he becomes someone else. Then he’s a lover (albeit a chaste one). He’s a singer (or at least a lip-syncher). He’s a fighter, a hero, a defender of the powerless.
You’ve never heard of him, but Zhaid Khan is a movie star.
The quiet pharmacist is the chiseled face, the rippling muscles, the romantic hero of the Pashto-language vision of a Hollywood set amid the towns and mountains of eastern Afghanistan. It is a region where Taliban attacks come all too regularly and it takes more than a little courage to be an actor.
Khan is famous across Jalalabad, and fans sometimes come to the pharmacy to gawk at him and ask for autographs. Sometimes, though, the Taliban seeks him out too. Members leave him notes in the night, warning they will burn down his shop and kill him. One day, he fears, they’ll follow through on their threats.
Small but stubborn industry
As Afghanistan struggles with an Islamist insurgency that has roared back since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, putting broad swaths of the country under Taliban control, a handful of actors is making a cinematic stand.
They do it with movies that are sold here only on DVD and will never make it to Western art-house cinemas. Stars like Khan are lucky if they make more than a few hundred dollars per film, which are shot for anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000.
There are shaky camera angles, wildly awful hairpieces and dialogue with the cadence of a news conference (“To achieve our goal, we must try to attain our objectives and what we have vowed to do,” a hero intones in “Black Poison,” an anti-opium morality tale).
Each film is a patchwork of themes — romance, thriller, weepy family drama — knitted together by martial-arts battles and lots of squirting sheep’s blood bought from local butchers. The bad guys all seem to have scars, limps or both. The good guys often wear white.
They are made, very often, with little beyond a camcorder, a couple of workshop lights and some pirated editing software. But, they’ll tell you here, their battle is worth fighting.
“We are changing how people think,” Khan said. “Young people see our movies and they know that Afghanistan is not just AK-47s and war. There’s something else here too.”
Taliban’s attacks on movies
The Taliban hardly exists in these movies. Religious extremism is sometimes hinted at, but most bad guys are generic gangsters or drug smugglers.
To the Taliban, though, the moviemakers are evil.
The Islamist fighters detest all forms of public entertainment, particularly any depiction of the human form, which they believe is forbidden by the Koran. When the Taliban ran the country, movies were forbidden, cinemas were closed and videotapes could only be watched in secret. When they were forced from power, that changed.
“One week after the Taliban were gone, we were filming again,” said Farooq Sabit, a one-time kung fu master who runs a small Kabul photography studio and has directed a half-dozen or so movies.
Shafiqullah Shaiq knows about the dangers of movie-making. First the Taliban left him notes, telling him to abandon the movie business. Then fighters attacked his office with grenades and sprayed it with machine-gun fire.
No one has been injured yet, but he now rings his office compound with gunmen. “I barely leave anymore,” Shaiq said.
“I know these movies were not really good enough for the rest of the world,” he said. Then he added, with more than a touch of cinematic noblesse oblige: “I made them for the poor Afghan people.”
