‘Sima’s Song’: Red Sea Review

Dir: Roya Sadat. Spain/Netherlands/France/Taiwan/Greece/Afghanistan. 2024. 97min

Kabul, 1978. The friendship between two faculty college students – Suraya (Mozhdah Jamalzadah), a rich socialist from a outstanding household, and Sima (Niloufar Koukhani), a gifted musician from a extra conventional Muslim background – is examined when their paths diverge. Roya Sadat’s drama explores a very turbulent interval in Afghanistan’s historical past (the Russian invasion, tensions between numerous factions in Afghan’s ruling occasion and the revolt of the militant mujahideen) by way of the experiences of ladies. And she or he deftly ties collectively this era of the nation’s historical past with the present plight of Afghan ladies below the rule of the Taliban.

The movie’s use of music eases us over among the extra dislocated plotting

That is the fourth characteristic by Herat-born Sadat, who, with Three Dots in 2003, was the primary feminine Afghan director lively within the post-Taliban interval of the early noughties. She adopted this with A Letter To The President in 2017, which generated pageant curiosity. Sima’s Track, which continues the director’s concentrate on female-led tales, involves Pink Sea after premiering at Tokyo and screening in Seville. Additional pageant bookings are definitely doable for this movie which shot in Athens and rural Greece, doubling for Kabul and its outskirts.

That appears incongruous at first. With its verdant vegetation and grand structure, it’s a world away from the battle-scarred metropolis acquainted from more moderen movies (there’s a quick thematic overlap with Sahra Mani’s feminist protest documentary Bread & Roses). However presumably that’s the purpose. Within the window of peace and progress earlier than the stress cooker tensions and worldwide meddling took its toll, Afghanistan was a unique world, notably for girls.

The image opens within the current day, monitoring a small however vocal protest of ladies petitioning for “bread, work and freedom”, a chant that will probably be acquainted to anybody who watched Mani’s movie. When the Taliban try and disperse them with gunfire, the ladies increase their voices in tune, led by an older girl. That is Suraya, now a grandmother marching alongside her granddaughter. She sings the tune to honour her pal, Sima, her granddaughter’s namesake.

The primary physique of the story then unfolds within the late Nineteen Seventies, a time of optimism and perception in social change for ladies like Suraya and Sima. Wearing western fashions and embracing the alternatives afforded by schooling, each ladies have a lot to stay up for. A gala reception, to commemorate Suraya’s late father – a professor and political heavyweight within the ruling occasion, the Individuals’s Democratic Occasion of Afghanistan – is a pivotal second for each. Suraya is honoured with a prestigious authorities place overseeing the reason for schooling for girls; Sima performs her rubab (a stringed lute-like instrument) and sings for the appreciative company.

Sima’s father, who works for Suraya’s household, is disturbed by the “lustful” appears that his daughter receives in the course of the efficiency and means that it’s excessive time that she have been married. Sima obligingly agrees; Suraya is appalled. However this isn’t the one space of disagreement between them. Suraya, who speaks Russian, is allied with the average, Socialist Parcham wing of the occasion, whereas Sima, who distrusts all politics, is drawn to Muslim militant conferences and, finally, opts to affix the mujahideen.

Of the 2, it’s Suraya’s story that’s extra satisfyingly developed. Sima, in the meantime, appears to lurch abruptly into extremism and fundamentalism. The movie’s use of music eases us over among the extra dislocated plotting. Sima’s tune, a conventional Afghan melody, is an affecting recurring motif. Equally highly effective is an excerpt from Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony, performed in a music class to a visibly transported Sima, reduce along with one other, darker sequence which exhibits authorities forces executing Sima’s father and arresting Suraya’s mom. However the movie’s handiest gadget can be its easiest: a montage of archive pictures of Afghan ladies from the liberated ’70s till the current day. All the things modifications, and on the similar time, every thing stays the identical.