Films This Week 8/06/21

by Gary Palmucci | 6th August 2021 | Gary's Corner

Hello everyone. As America’s twenty-year ‘engagement’ in Afghanistan hurtles toward a seemingly inevitable tragic end, this week’s new Virtual Cinema documentary ‘What We Left Unfinished’ takes on added disquieting dimensions.

In today’s NY Times critic Devika Girish writes “…five movies started and then abandoned during Afghanistan’s 1978-92 Communist era form a dazzling time capsule of the nation’s political and cultural history. The director (and now Brooklyn resident) Mariam Ghani – daughter of its current president Ashraf Ghani – digs into the archives of Afghan Film, a state-run company that endured the whims and demands of various regimes before the Taliban destroyed most of its holdings in the 1990s.”

The films excerpted reflect the country’s series of political upheavals – one was commissioned by an Afghan president whose subsequent assassination in the late 70s Russian takeover prompted its shutdown (!); each of them display a visual sophistication and production values on a par with many other international productions of the period ( check out the vivid trailer, below) and, accompanied by interviews with surviving filmmakers suggest a potentially rich Afghan film culture, now buried under decades of censorship and bloody struggle.

Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema