Hazara Nation

Philip French

Movies about young people and by very young directors are a notable feature of Iranian cinema and the latest striking picture from that country, Buddha Collapsed out of Shame, centres on a six-year-old Afghan girl searching for an education and is written and directed by 19-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf. Her father is the leading Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and her sister, Samira Makhmalbaf, had a feature film in competition in Cannes before she was 18.

The movie begins and ends with the shocking 2001 newsreel image of the Taliban blowing up the gigantic statues of the Buddha in Bamyan and in between presents a day in the life of a girl living in the impoverished village still littered with the rubble from the explosion.

Baktay, the film's little heroine, sees a boy living in the next-door cave reading a book and becomes determined to go to school. First, she has to raise the money for a notebook and a pencil by selling the eggs of the family's chicken. She only gets enough for the notebook, but takes her mother's lipstick as a writing instrument and sets out wearing a yellow scarf on her head and an ankle-length dress.

On her journey, she's waylaid by a gang of boys playing a game in which they're Taliban fighting Americans. They terrorise Baktay, rip pages from her book, seize her irreligious lipstick, put a paper bag over her head and pretend to bury her alive. It's one of the most terrifying sequences of recent years. 'In God's name, let me go to school,' she pleads.

When she eventually escapes, she's rejected by an open-air boys' school and finally finds the place for girls. But again she has a nasty experience with the Taliban kids on the way home. Only when she pretends to be killed does she find peace. This is a deeply affecting but wholly unaffected picture, direct, truthful and unsentimental, and Nikbakht Noruz makes an indelible impression as the brave Baktay.