Insult sows seeds of Granaz Moussavi’s Afghanistan war film When Pomegranates Howl
Most people would not have even noticed the careless omission in a news report back in February, 2013. But for filmmaker Granaz Moussavi, it was the catalyst for a powerful new movie.
When she learnt that two Afghan boys had been killed by shots fired from a NATO helicopter while out collecting firewood with their donkeys, Granaz Moussavi was watching the evening news from her couch in Adelaide. It was February 2013, midway through the so-called Forever War, a costly and unpopular campaign that did in fact have a beginning and now, it seems, an end. It’s an unsatisfying end: as American and allied troops withdraw from Afghanistan, they leave behind a resurgent Taliban and a nation in no better shape than when they invaded following the 9/11 terrorist attacks 20 years ago.
Moussavi, 44, is a storyteller, an Iranian-Australian poet and filmmaker, and she was drawn to the careless insult buried in the Western news report she was watching on TV. Both Australian and American soldiers had been involved in the shooting, they said. In the central province of Uruzgan, they said. It was an accident, they said. What they didn’t say were the names of the boys.
“I was shocked,” she says now, from her new home office in Melbourne, where she waits for the world to open up again. “The ugly side of war is everywhere, but the way it’s relayed to people is also part of the narrative. Talking very casually about the killing of two little boys without giving them faces or names – I think it just empowers the narrative of ‘otherness’, that we in Australia are different from the people and their kids in other corners of the world.”
The seeds of a film were sown in that moment. The spirit of the two Afghan boys – brothers Toor Jan, 11, and Andul Wodood, 12 – would be channelled through a single character: 10-year-old Hewad, a blameless naif who peddles amulets and pomegranates on the streets of Kabul while harbouring dreams of becoming a movie star. The film would be anti-war, but subtly; a quietly devastating lament against the horror and futility of the combat that had shredded the heart of Afghanistan. It would be called When Pomegranates Howl and, to film it, she’d have to travel to a war zone: the beautiful, traumatised capital of Kabul.
A squall of apprehension escorted Moussavi into Kabul International Airport in 2017. “I was uneasy and scared,” she says. “On one hand I was excited but I was unsure about my own safety and what I could expect.” There was another emotion present as she flew over the spectacular Hindu Kush mountain range into the Kabul Valley. Born and raised in Tehran, the capital of neighbouring Iran, Moussavi was eager to discover “a part of my identity in terms of shared history and language and culture”.
Passionate and politically engaged, Moussavi marries a poet’s sense of imagery with a rebel heart. At 22 she left Iran with her father, a TV sound engineer, and mother, a video grader, to join extended family who had settled in Adelaide. Already an established poet, having published several volumes of contemporary Persian verse, she later graduated with an honours degree in screen studies from Adelaide’s Flinders University and a degree in film editing from the Australian Film Television and Radio School.
In 2009, she created a stir with her debut feature film, My Tehran for Sale, filmed on the sly in Iran and edited together from handheld digital footage smuggled out in backpacks. Set against a backdrop of rarely glimpsed urban subcultures, it was an unauthorised look at the struggle for cultural freedom in the repressive Islamic state.
Iranian authorities promptly banned it. Lead actress Marzieh Vafamehr, a close friend of Moussavi’s, was imprisoned for a year in Iran’s notorious Qarchak Prison and sentenced to 90 lashes. (She later had her sentence reduced and the lashes overturned on appeal.) “I was very upset, I was so worried about her,” says Moussavi, who has been unable to publish any of her poetry in Iran since.
Ahead of filming her fearless follow-up to My Tehran for Sale, Moussavi spent 18 months setting up a network in Kabul “from scratch” and location scouting while researching and writing her script. Although she’d initially thought she might film in relatively safe Pakistan, she realised that, for authenticity’s sake, it had to be Kabul. “You are deprived of the important parts of the narrative when you are in comfortable countries,” she says.
Filmgoers will reap the reward. Besides legitimising the fictional narrative, shooting on Kabul’s steeply pitched streets turned When Pomegranates Howl into a cultural artefact. Because of the dangers on the ground, films featuring real exterior shots are exceedingly rare. Hollywood movies about Afghanistan use lookalike locales including Morocco, Somalia, Abu Dhabi and the US state of New Mexico. And so, to many Australians, life in that impossibly foreign country is an abstraction.
Moussavi’s film, a micro-budget guerrilla project, brings the ancient city of Kabul to life, with all its dust-choked traffic jams and marketplace clamour. It celebrates the majestic geography and the beauty of its architecture, along with the resilience of a population put through a 40-year wringer of war, fundamentalism and occupation. Mysterious and enchanting, Kabul is also a place where landmines are painted the bright colours of toys to lure children into picking them up.
Iranian cinema often features children as symbols of innocence, and Moussavi has chosen to tell her story through the eyes of 10-year-old Hewad (played by newcomer Arafat Faiz). The boy becomes the main breadwinner for his family after his father and older brother are “martyred”, but he holds on tight to his dream. Working late into the night, trundling his wooden cart through the streets, he still finds time for play, “directing” his cast of local kids through the aperture of an old tin can.
“Children are like music: the universal language of affection,” Moussavi says. “Even the most biased people, when it comes to children, they are less judgmental. Even the fiercest supporters of wars and weapons, who feel entitled to import their ideologies or way of life into other countries, I’m hoping they at least give the narrative their attention without bias and maybe some kind of light gets in.”
War lurks just outside the frame in this new film, in the sound of Black Hawk helicopters flying to and from NATO’s Kabul headquarters and in the background thrum of explosions. When the violence does take centre stage, it is singular, intense and crushing. For Moussavi the poet, the pomegranates of the title are deeply symbolic: “The broken pomegranate screams and bleeds for all those people who don’t have a voice. No matter how otherly they may look, they are still human beings made of flesh and blood.”
Comfort is anathema to Moussavi, who sees it as a barrier to truth. Not for her the protection afforded most foreigners in Kabul: the barricaded compounds, armed guards and drivers, the transport with bulletproof glass. “That kind of life is not me,” she says. “I prefer to live where other people live.” She unpacked her bags in 2017 in the central district of Taimani, where she still has a room and possessions awaiting a return disrupted by the pandemic. Here, she lived with the fear that has long been part of life in Kabul.
“The danger is very real,” she says. “Every time you step out you never know if you will get exploded and not come back home.” A well-known poet she knew was killed in an explosion in west Kabul. And the building housing the Alliance Francaise branch where Moussavi took French classes had been the target of two bombings. “Every time I went to class and back that thought was with me,” she says. “For locals, it’s part of their everyday life. You share each day that there was an explosion here and an explosion there. These kind of connections with people are emotionally very important and it gave me an extra motivation and courage to do this. Living there was definitely part of the creative process of writing the script and working on the film.”
Moussavi employed non-actors, and overcoming the locals’ wariness about being captured on film was a further challenge. “They were always very uneasy,” she says. “First of all, someone carrying a camera is not as normal as it might be in other places. There are a lot of people with traditional lifestyles and way of thinking, and they are very protective of their images and identities. That is the cultural side of it, and then there is a lot of suspicion about their security and safety. It was difficult to find families who would trust me to let their children act in a film.”
She relied heavily on local help, as well as crew from Iran and Australians living in Kabul. The latter included artist Ben Quilty’s photojournalist cousin Andrew Quilty, who appears in the film. “It’s a war zone so whoever joined the team did it knowing it was a micro-budget project and they were doing it just for the love and the urge to tell people’s stories,” she says.
With the situation in Afghanistan rapidly deteriorating amid fears of a return to extremist rule or civil war, Moussavi is increasingly concerned for the safety of the cast and crew left behind. “There is not a day that I don’t think about those people and my friends,” she says. “Obviously I’m sitting here in a safe comfort zone and all those people are there in that unpredictable situation.”
For all the danger, Moussavi misses the city she once called home. “Oh very much so,” she says. “Even though it’s war-torn, even though hidden behind concrete walls for protection, you can still trace all that beauty in the city. The images that get out of war zones are more about destroyed palaces after explosions. Rarely do you see images of the city the way it is, full of life, full of people trying to hold on to the remaining hope.”
Much of the film is shot in and around the district of Karte-Sakhi, in western Kabul. Thousands of traditional mud homes blanket the surrounding mountains; many have recently been painted in rainbow colours, as part of a local government initiative to brighten the battle-scarred capital. The hills are awash with joyful pinks, blues and whites – but no red. Red is an unloved colour in Kabul, reminiscent of the constant bloodshed that has plagued the city.
In the skirts of the mountains is the sprawling Karte-Sakhi cemetery, where Moussavi shot the vivid final scenes during a snowfall. It is huge, and it is busy. Typical of Kabul’s many cemeteries, Karte-Sakhi is home to a bustling slice of everyday life: there are cockfights and picnics, men huddling together smoking. The place is alive with children and vendors, often one and the same. It is a fact of life in Kabul that, after four decades of war and countless tragedies, so many Afghan families have reason to visit.
“There must be options other than war,” Moussavi says. “Other than sending armed forces to places when it is just going to destroy lives – Australian lives and the lives of people and kids there. Look at the Iraq invasion, look at the Afghanistan invasion; I can’t see any tangible outcome that justifies all the killing.”
When Pomegranates Howl screens at the Sydney Film Festival (Nov 3-14; program announced soon).