User reviews

Osama is the first movie made after the fall of the Taliban last year. It shows the story of a young girl who is forced to disguise herself as a boy so that she can work and feed her hungry mother and grandmother. Winner a Golden Globe for foreign language film is about 80 minutes long.

I have got to say that this film will really give a massive shock to the viewers with some of the scenes. The severity of some of the actions and policies of the Taliban were really extreme and it sometimes is hard to understand how people could do this to other people.

One of the first scenes you see in the film is that of a rally of women all asking for jobs so that they could feed their families. It is a breathtaking and powerful scene as you see hundreds of women all clad in their blue burkas. This I felt was one of the ways the director was able to portray the harshness of the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan. You could see the peoples hardship and longing for a better life.

I was rather pleasantly surprised to hear that all of the actors in the film are all locals of Afghanistan and do not have any experience in acting. They all did great jobs in putting across the material especially Marina Golbahari, the lead actress. I guess it was easy translating real life experiences to the scenes in a film.

The director also did quite a laudable job of making a rather bleak atmosphere throughout the film. A lot of the scenes had dark lighting and not a single second of musical score throughout the film added to the overall dark atmosphere of the film. He also did a good job in making the Taliban a menacing force, which you would learn to hate.

A good film overall and it was really effective in putting the message across even if the movie was just 80 minutes long. 80 minutes of powerful filmaking and its simplicity is the main reason that this film is a good one.

A simple and sad story told in a beautiful picture, but what makes the film really interesting is the context of it, the dramatic reality of a reli-fascistic society in which women mean nothing that is outlined to us. A reality that fortunately doesn't exist anymore in the same way in Afghanistan, but in various forms is still practiced in a number of countries. The actors are all non-profi's and they play wonderful. The only optimistic thing you can say about the film is that the girl playing the leading part (who was a beggar) could buy a simple house for her and her family after having played in the film.

The Taliban is ruthlessly ruling Afghanistan and repressive especially for women who are demonstrating for work. Osama, her mother and her grandmother are without a male in their family. The hospital is closing and the mother is without work. Doctors and nurses are arrested. She doesn't get any of the pay she's owed. The only option left is to disguise Osama as a boy.

This is an unforgiving portrait of life under the Taliban. It is probably as close as any modern thinking person wish to be. It is a place without hope. It's the gritty realism of Afghanistan that makes this so compelling. It is an unrelenting film about oppression.

Inspired by a true story, this movie shares some insight into the world of being a woman in Afghanistan, as ruled by the Taliban, and it is not a pretty picture. As a single/widowed woman it is nearly impossible to get by if you don't have a male in the family. The Taliban will not let the women work, so they can't make money to feed their family. The men go out and fight in the Afghani war and when they are killed, their family is left destitute. The women are left with nothing but fear, heartbreak, and hopelessness. Osama is the story a family, consisting of three generations of women, trying to survive this repressive country. In desperation, the grandmother and mother decide to disguise the preteen daughter as a boy, so "he" can get work to support the family. Renamed Osama, the girl is completely out of her element and petrified, just walking in the streets, let alone as all the boys are rounded up by the Taliban and forced into school and military training. There were many things to like about this foreign movie, but also things that bugged me. This was the first entirely Afghan film shot since the fall of the Taliban, and Biarmak (the director), used all amateurs, people taken off the streets of Kabul, to shoot this film...Therein lies some of the problems. Maybe it's a cultural thing, maybe poor acting or poor directing, but some of the film didn't feel right. When Osama was whining and making poor decisions, I didn't feel that it was realistic, for a girl who would certainly be killed, if her secret was discovered. I think common sense would have made her not use her high pitched voice & whine so much. Also, I read that the title of the movie and the ending was completely changed to an opposite outcome from the original. I don't want to spoil anything for anyone, but the ending wasn't what I was hoping for. All in all this is a moving and insightful film and definitely worth watching, as long as you don't mind subtitles, a realistic but slow moving story, and an ending that isn't tied up in a neat little bow. 7.4 out of 10 stars In My Humble Opinion! 08/2013

'Osama' attempts to give a snapshot of life in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime, focussing chiefly upon a young girl forced to disguise herself as a boy in order to put food on the table for her family, of whom all the male members have been killed. Women were forbidden to work under Taliban law, and the film makes clear the terror and hopelessness of a war-torn world held under an oppressive medieval, religious doctrine. Billed as the first Afghan film following the overthrow of the Taliban, it is perhaps inevitable that they should be the subject. For the most part, I was entirely drawn into the bleak and unjust landscape of 'Osama', although the film is not without some faults, with some key elements not adequately explored and an ending that for me did not entirely work.

Filmed on location in Kabul, 'Osama' needs do little to show the horrors of war - the evidence is all around and the locals so used to it that many have never known anything different. The complete undermining of Afghan civilisation by the Taliban is omnipresent in every scene where they are not in frame. They are introduced in the film often out of shot, highlighting the facelessness with which they are viewed. To an extent, it is a shame that their motives and background are never explored in any depth, sometimes reducing them to the level of fanatical religious boogeymen - propaganda-like in its execution, which has the unfortunate result of oversimplifying the film's discourse. This is not a question of sympathy, but of avoiding demonisation and the same level of ignorance practiced by the overlords under scrutiny. Unless of course Barmak was suggesting that the Taliban's two-dimensional nature is the sum-total of their being, which I don't think was the case.

Yet this does not undermine the film's central aim: to portray the total subjugation of women, leading to a life of oppression, poverty and destitution, wherein there is no chance of escape. Central to this is the young girl herself, who at no time convinces in her attempts to hide her identity, making the conclusion to her storyline inevitable. It's entirely believable that this practice would have been perpetuated by a desperate people in a world where only men have any authority whatsoever, yet since the producers are keen to make it clear that women are the the greatest victims of Taliban rule, any such attempt is utterly impossible. The absolute terror and misery conveyed by Marina Golhabari as Osama is powerful and convincing, yet horrifying precisely because it is so. Obtaining his cast from the general public, director Siddiq Barmak has something of a mixed bag, with some performers unable to match their contemporaries, yet Golhabari is clearly not acting a lot of the time so much as reliving.

The ending took me back to the sheer hopelessness summed up in the climax to Joan Chen's 'Xiu Xiu', depicting the forced relocation of youths during the Chinese Cultural revolution. Yet in 'Osama', I found the film's closing to be somewhat abrupt and lacking. Apparently, Barmak did have an alternate ending in mind that he later felt would undermine the story's theme. On the one hand, it could be argued that ongoing misery has no ending, yet it doesn't change my feeling that the credits rolled too soon. This is ironic really, as I felt the film's overall length was more than enough to get its message across, and ironic further still, considering that for the central characters, there is no ending to their suffering. Or it may be that I simply didn't want to accept the final scene as an ending.

However, 'Osama' does not fail to convey its message, not to mention at least some of the horrors suffered by the story's victims, for I don't think anyone on this side of the screen could ever truly understand unless they had seen it for themselves. Storywise, I felt it needed further development of certain elements and more thought into some of the editing, but its central aim to invoke feelings of disgust and despair at the destruction of lives in the aim of ignorance and fanaticism is firmly intact.