Title: Kites
Awards: Silver Award
Director: Beata Dzianowicz
Country: Poland
Runtime: 80 mins
Language: Polish
Film Ratings:
Synopsis:
At a Kabul art school, Polish cameraman Jacek Szaranski holds a seminar entitled "Kabul - My City" in which he gives students the task of shooting a documentary. After a couple of first attempts, they begin to produce extraordinary footage portraying Afghanistan "from within", through the eyes of young Afghan men and women. Initially, the lecturer encounters pride among his students. This prevents them from depicting the reality of their lives, which is full of problems. Gradually, however, they listen to his requests for them to swap experiences with him. ("I have no idea what it means to be at war for 35 years, and you don't know what it is like to live a normal life in peace. I want to see this city through your eyes and I also want to see how you view the world."). The young men and women begin to understand the camera as a tool that they can use to study the human soul. They stop manipulating their subjects. They gain the trust of the people they are filming, and subsequently get sincere answers to their most important questions. This documentary, which won the Critics' Week Prize at the Locarno Film Festival, gradually metamorphoses into a mosaic of micro-stories that portray contemporary Afghan society in a manner that is never reflected in television news reports.
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