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“Land of the Enlightened” shows Afghanistan’s young still have dreams
As a photojournalist in Afghanistan in 2006, Pieter-Jan De Pue saw first-hand how children were scratching a living by selling military shells and scrap metal in the midst of war. His hybrid docu-fiction film, “Land of the Enlightened”, blends realism with romance to tell the story of their survival and dreams of a future in peace.
“By the end of 2008, I'd basically found out how many kids were trying to survive in the war by collecting all the things you see in the film; brass, scrap metal, selling explosives, working in the lapis lazuli mine and cultivating opium,” De Pue told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival.
Filmed over seven years, “Land of the Enlightened” follows children from the Kuchi tribe as they eke out a living from selling ammunition. The film, which has just had its British premiere in Sheffield after screenings at Sundance and Rotterdam, juxtaposes documentary footage with constructed scenarios drawn from De Pue’s own experiences.
Those experiences inspired him to tell a different story of Afghanistan – one of a country that was entangled with its current reality but which also pinned its hopes on the dreams of a new generation, blending childish imagination and fantasy with questions about how life might be after the war.
“I remember this boy was telling me ‘I want to become the king of Afghanistan and when the Americans go back home I'm going to grab the palace and I'm going to live there with a beautiful queen, I will have boys around me who're going to protect my queen,” said De Pue.
The film includes similarly romantic tales from other children, including one boy who said: “I'm going to take my horse escape to the stars, live between the stars and leave the reality of Afghanistan behind me.”
De Pue discovered his leading actor in Gholam Nasir, the son of a local village chief with natural charisma, but filming him and the other children presented distinct challenges.
He said: “Gholam is a very strong character and he's not an actor, so we can't say, ‘walk here or turn to camera’. It was about taking the right shots and giving him a lot of freedom and filming in an organic way. And because there was no electricity, the kids we filmed with had never seen a television, they had never seen a computer or a moving image.
“For them, the filmmaking process was very abstract, they thought it was a game. In the beginning they even thought the camera was a rocket launcher.”
Straight documentary segments show American and Afghan forces alongside scenes of live-fire, and in other segments foreign troops are seen meeting village elders.
“American forces were stationed 15 months on a mountain top looking into a valley and they never came down into the village to see how local life was,” de Pue said. “They were only trying to imagine what life was like and projecting ideas, and trying to understand how Afghans live - but they never saw that.”
This gap in understanding went both ways, he said. “The kids were actually doing the same thing: they were listening of the radio saying, ‘'They are doing this, or they have plans to redraw, or Barack Obama says that', but they were never in touch with the Americans in a direct way and this gap of space and the projection towards one another was something I wanted to show in this film.”
The message of “Land of Enlightenment” is one of hope, despite the deteriorating security situation since the withdrawal of Nato forces.
“This is the mentality of a lot of Afghan people, who've endured war for more than 40 years now, after the Brits, after the Russians, after the Americans, the Taliban, the Mujahideen, they have dealt with war for a long time and they always made the best out of it,” said De Pue.
“They have a huge resilience, they are always looking for solutions, they're very inventive and I think this is how the next generation in Afghanistan will be as well.”
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