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The Beauty Academy of Kabul

Compelling doc avoids coming off too didactic

By GERALD PEARY | April 19, 2006

3.0 Stars

Shot in Afghanistan just months after the seeming smashing of the Taliban, Liz Mermin’s engaging film already seems a nostalgia item remembering a better, more optimistic time. A bunch of New York hair stylists calling themselves Beauty Without Borders land in Kabul and set up shop, teaching local women who had suffered under Taliban misogynist puritanism to perm their hair, wear make-up, and preen like Western women. Mermin allows you to decide whether the Afghan women are being liberated, or brainwashed into the most frivolous kind of femininity, or something in between. Whatever, lots of these women are as charming as they are courageous in their harrowing war memories, and somehow this documentary, without being didactic, manages to stretch in compelling ways the boundaries of feminism.

Related: Books not bombs, Suicide Attacks Target Kabul Peacekeepers, Welcome back, Castro, More

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It’s symbolic that Afghanistan’s largest school for girls occupies the building that used to house the country’s largest Taliban madrassa
Suicide Attacks Target Kabul Peacekeepers
KABUL, Afghanistan - Two separate suicide attackers rammed car bombs into vehicles belonging to NATO-led peacekeepers Monday in Kabul, killing at least one German soldier and wounding at least 13 people in the first major attack on foreign troops in the capital in more than a year.
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Judicial ups and downs
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Flashbacks: September 29, 2006
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Five summers ago, in the weeks before terrorists slammed fully loaded passenger planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, national television was obsessed with what? The Taliban? Osama bin Laden? Nope. Sharks.
Kite club
In spite of being lovingly realized and creatively cast, The Kite Runner is a simplistic adaptation of a powerful, multi-layered story.
Ransom Notes
While reporting from Afghanistan two years ago, David Rohde became, for the second time in his career, an unwilling participant rather than an observer. On October 29, 1995, Rohde had been arrested by Bosnian Serbs. And then in November 2008, Rohde and two Afghan colleagues were en route to an interview with a Taliban commander when they were kidnapped.
Debating the Middle East muddle
US military aid to Pakistan and Afghanistan is being wasted and should be redirected to the police and moderate non-violent groups working for education and the rule of law, according to two Middle East experts who spoke Sunday at the Community Church of Providence.
Explosively bad
Abroad and at home, the future looks grim.
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Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who served Massachusetts for 46 years — sometimes surrounded by controversy, but always with distinction — was the only one of Joseph P. Kennedy’s four sons to die surrounded by family at home in his bed.
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Topics: Reviews , Culture and Lifestyle, War and Conflict, The Taliban, More

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