Three Songs For Benazir

Shaista is young and handsome and sings love songs which provoke warm laughter. Benazir laughs a lot. She too is young, and she wears beautiful clothes and brightly coloured bracelets and is bursting with life. One suspects that she glowed just as much before she got pregnant. They’re both excited about the pregnancy and the love between them shines out of the screen. But Shaista and Benazir live in a refugee camp for displaced persons in Afghanistan, and Shaista doesn’t want to depend on handouts. He longs to get a job so that he can support his family.

There are not many options for an inexperienced, uneducated, largely unskilled young man in a place like this. We see him making bricks at the side of the road. Nobody seems to be buying, but a passer-by throws him some words of encouragement along the lines of “Build it and they will come” – not all that helpful when one is really poor. So he decides to join the army, as impoverished young men often do. But that’s not simple either. If he does so, not only will he have to leave his loved ones alone but the Taliban will come for his family.

There is another option. There are the poopy fields. There, beneath the warm sun, people work in relative safety, gathering sap from the plump green seed heads as the flowers fade. It’s safe, at any rate, as long as one can avoid consuming its refined product, but although we do not see it directly here, it’s well known that those in control of the trade know how to keep their workers coming back.

Elizabeth and Gulistan Mirzaei’s documentary spans a period of four years. Through it all shines the couple’s love. Through it all, Shaista finds songs to sing. But the years take a heavy toll. There is no need to pronounce on it. It is shockingly visible. Through careful editing choices, the directors invite us to empathise with people whose most important experiences are close to universal, then show us how hard life can be due to circumstances over which one has no control, just because of where one is born.