It’s Springertime as MADtv opens its new season-CNN
September 15, 2007
From the ridiculous to the sublime. Or serious, at any rate. CNN’s sober, semi-regular documentary series
Special Investigations Unit takes viewers deep inside Afghanistan in the eye-opening Lifting the Veil, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s compelling followup to 2001’s Beneath the Veil.
By now, even a casual follower of the news knows the background: women were oppressed under the Taliban, attained new dignity and freedom after the fall of the Taliban, and are now facing repression again, as religious fundamentalists exert their influence in the wake of renewed Taliban attacks.
Obaid-Chinoy is a soft-spoken but quietly intense guide through the labyrinthine maze of Afghan society, and she shares several sad, intimate tales of women and young girls forced into arranged marriages, compelled to wear burqas and denied schooling. It’s not all a downer, though. At one point, Obaid-Chinoy has an emotional reunion with a young girl from Beneath the Veil; the girl is now in school, and happier for it. That’s a side of the story you don’t often hear about.
Lifting the Veil is well worth a look at something a little deeper and more meaningful than the usual Saturday-night TV fare. (8 & 11 p.m., CNN)
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