Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame

Massively affecting Iranian film, mixing the cute and the harrowing to unique effect. The story concerns Baktay, a tenacious little girl who lives with her family in the Bamyan caves, near where the Taliban dynamited the Buddha statues in 2001. Her friend Abbas is being showy about his learning at school one day, and Baktay decides on the spot that she wants to go too. She needs a notebook and something to write with for starters, but she can't find her mum to get any money for these things. So she ties her baby sibling in the cave to prevent its wandering, grabs a few eggs for bartering purposes and sets out on what must, for a small kid, be an exceedingly arduous day of schoolbound adventure.

The turns of this story are strong and clear in a way that reminds me of the dynamics of a children's storybook. The film is shot intimately on video, and the little heroine's performance and dialogue are extremely charming, and inevitably natural and unpredictable, too. I imagine there were very few actors by profession in this film, if any. Many of the obstacles Baktay faces are cute – 'Don't eat me,' she instructs a big dog who's in her way. In another scene, she shoves through a herd of goats while brandishing a loaf of bread. Other obstacles are incredibly ugly, like the ongoing harassment she suffers at the hands of kids playing 'Taliban', who hold her hostage, put a bag over her head and threaten to stone her.

Baktay's homeland is so barren and blasted, and her thwarted needs so relatively simple, that as a Westerner, part of me was always pained to be watching this film. But the charms of the little girl's persistence and the humour of her interaction with everything that gets in her way create real joy. Whenever this joy is blotted out by the shadows of the Taliban's influence on the region, the film can turn and become upsetting within an instant. It's the inseparability of these two modes which makes Buddha such an emotionally wrenching, or even complicated, film. Yet its story is very beautiful and simple. The film will definitely stay with me.