Director Phil Grabsky’s latest project has been arduously assembled, spanning a decade in the life of a boy and his troubled country. Afghanistan became a sudden fascination for the British filmmaker and rather than ponder its plight and compelling his landscapes from afar he decided, armed with a camera, to journey into the fray, to unravel its mysteries, perhaps even dispelling a few misconceptions while he was at it.
The initial result of Grabsky’s investigation was his 2004 film The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The Boy Mir is an extension of that work, charting the intervening years as Mir grows up before our eyes, from a smiling, curious, energetic young boy to his first trying year of manhood.
Though as a narrative the film feels undisciplined and occasionally too freeform for the neat confinement of a ninety minute summation, there is still much of worth to savour here, including temperate views of the landscape encasing these nomadic people. Harsh jagged vistas are often juxtaposed against crisp, azure skies to reflect a natural, unrefined beauty.
Unexpected comedy emerges from the bickering relationship between Mir’s parents whose hostility and insults fly with wild abandon. Yet they endure as refugees living in the ruins of the Taliban destroyed Bamiyan before forlornly trekking over miles of terrain for better prospects. But Mir’s family is powerless, as hemmed in to fulfilling their assigned roles as their countrymen to a nomadic quest in retrieval of an increasingly ambiguous identity. Mir’s half-brother Khushdel is perhaps the more interesting case study, his decency and hard working ideals forged with a grim determination that acts as a foil to Mir’s own free spirited attitude to life.
As the film nears completion, Mir, on the verge of vacating his teenage years, is torn between vocations, wavering at a metaphorical crossroads. Does he slave away on the land like his half-brother or more adamantly pursue his schooling in the hope of one day ensuring a better life? These are not simple questions to consider for the harshness of the climate and the political uncertainty that both isolates and encapsulates this broken place make any lilting gaze at a possible future unclear.
Grabsky, a prolific documentarian, has made a fine, though not essential portrait of Afghanistan. His view may be distracted from the bigger picture by his fascination with a reduced perspective through increasingly less innocent eyes, but The Boy Mir (2011), regardless of its shortcomings, is still a valuable document with enough cursory insights into its subject matter to imbue it with lasting value.
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