From Saturday's Globe and Mail
The ancient city of Peshawar in Pakistan’s northwest has long been a cultural crossroads. In the last few decades, it also become a centre for popular Pashto cinema. These are ultra-low-budget movies made by locals for locals, revenge stories filled with blazing guns, broad slapstick and Bollywood-style dance numbers, are financed and sold by local shop-owners. In other words, they’re not coming soon to multiplex near you.
In the highly entertaining, intimate and eye-opening The Miscreants of Taliwood, George Gittoes – a respected Australian war artist who has worked in many of the world’s hot zones – takes us deep into this filmmaking frontier. The final film in a documentary trilogy exploring popular culture in the context of war, Miscreants contrasts Pashto movies and their makers with the complex social and political struggles in a region few Westerners know beyond the nightly news.
The film was well received at last year’s Telluride festival, and it receives its Canadian premiere this weekend at Toronto’s International Diaspora Film Festival, which presents a slate of mostly foreign movies focusing on outsider stories.
Miscreants opens with the homegrown movie industry on the brink of being shut down by the ruling MMA Islamic fundamentalist coalition, which has been burning DVDs and systematically shutting down shops that sell DVDs (often with bombs) over several years. “The culture will come to a standstill,” says one eloquent shopkeeper. “The people will lose entertainment.” All that may be left to watch, people worry, are videos made by the Taliban of increasingly horrific executions.
Gittoes’ investigations land him on the front lines – including at the Red Mosque siege in Islamabad in 2007. And he later played a variety of Western characters in Pashto movies and even made one himself. An act of personal activism, the film was made in the local style and became a best-seller, all proceeds going to the players.
In addition to asides about male sexual behaviour, the status of women and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Gittoes interviews Peshawar University professors and even, in one edgy scene, an MMA leader. But the most memorable characters are the film folk, in particular Javed Musazai, a tall, burly fellow who supports an large extended family through his acting.
A sprawling, personal performance-art essay, Miscreants of Taliwood makes a convincing case for popular entertainment as a basic human right.
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