Lifting the Veil
Brad Newsome, Reviewer
This documentary looks at the plight of women in Afghanistan.
Lifting the Veil.
- Type
- Documentary
- Channel
- CNN
- Date
- Saturday September 15
- Time
- 4:00 PM
Back in 2001 (before September 11), journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy travelled across Afghanistan to make Behind the Veil, a documentary that revealed the hell that Afghan women lived in under the Taliban. This year she returned to see if things had improved, and for most of this harrowing documentary it seems that they haven’t. In Kabul she dons a burqa to beg with one of the country’s million war widows, seeing how the woman has to endure the abuse and contempt of men on the streets each day as she scrapes together a pittance to feed her two teenage daughters. From there, Obaid-Chinoy is off to a hospital to meet survivors of Afghanistan’s self-immolation epidemic. In some of the documentary’s most distressing footage, horribly burned young women – one of them six months pregnant – explain how they doused themselves in kerosene and set themselves alight in a bid to escape from and protest against the violence and oppression they endured. Then there’s a visit with a child bride – who also tried to burn herself, at the age of 11 – and the family of a murdered poet and the husband who killed her. There is some respite for the viewer in Obaid-Chinoy’s visits to schools where young girls run around squealing happily, but even here we are reminded that the Taliban has stepped up its murderous campaign against teachers and students. Although Obaid-Chinoy finds joy and hope in places she least expected to, she reminds us that Afghanistan’s problems have not been solved by the invasion and that billions of dollars in promised aid has still not arrived. The program will be repeated tomorrow at 4pm.
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