In Kamay, Ilyas Yourish's soulful documentary feature debut screened at the BFI London Film Festival this October, the camera follows the Khawari family as they tend to their land in the remote mountains of central Afghanistan's Daikundi province.
The weather is frigid. Thick white snow coats both their homestead and the vast terrain. As they try to collect water they discover their well has dried up. But that does not matter. The mother leads her husband and their son in unravelling a long plastic pipe to syphon water from a dammed stream instead. When leaks emerge, the mother simply builds a fire, melts the ends of the yellow plastic tubing and efficiently plugs the holes with it.
It's an effective solution that typifies the self-sustaining methods of this poor, farming household. It is also a scene that exemplifies the symbolism of the film's title. Kamay is the name of a wild, self-sufficient plant indigenous to the region and so is the Hazara community this family is a part of.
According to the opening title cards, the Hazaras were brutally suppressed by the Afghan Amir Abdul Rahman Khan, in the 19th century, when he tried to annex their region. The Hazara people were massacred after they tried to resist. The Amir's troops claimed the lives of over half of their population and took women and children as slaves. But some 40 Hazara girls decided to jump off the mountain to their death instead of being enslaved.
130 years later, the Hazaras' way of life is still under threat. The cloud of suicide is also darkening their community and over 105 minutes, Yourish presents their macro struggle through the micro story of the Kharawi family as they face brutal bureaucracy and injustice once tragedy strikes.
Shot over six years, Kamay offers an intimate portrait of a family grappling with the death of their daughter Zahra, a veterinary student who took her own life in November 2017 while attending Kabul University. The information Yourish gives viewers regarding the circumstances of Zahra's death is as sparse as the landscapes of mountains and valleys the camera frequently cuts to.
It's a compelling yet frustrating technique that ensures the Khawari family's perspective is always centred even as systemic powers marginalise them in their pursuit of justice and autonomy.
An early scene sees Zahra's father Karbalayi call an attorney about his daughter's case while his wife and young son with a learning disability watch. They offer polite pleasantries to one another until Karbalayi says, "One year has passed and the outcome is still unknown — did you come to any conclusion?" After a long pause, the attorney soberly tells him she is not aware of that case.
It's at this moment that we are given the first substantial hint that Zahra's suicide was a result of academic malfeasance. "I don't even know who is at fault," Karbalayi says."Zahra or the lecturer?" The camera captures his crestfallen face and the sombre look of his wife in the background.
The narration — co-written by Yourish and collaborator Shahrokh Bikaran but spoken by Zahra's sister Freshta — is an often poetic framing device that leaves intimate breadcrumbs for audiences to glean clues about Zahra's declining mental state, seemingly caused by her dismissive dissertation tutor who rejected her thesis three times. It is also a sorrowful illumination of Freshta and her family's grief over the loss of her sister.
The film's meandering pace emphasises the family's long struggle for truth while being so disconnected from the city where Zahra died.
The family make several arduous trips to Kabul to find answers and support. Zahra's male student peers are uneasy when asked to commit to giving evidence at a trial despite making supportive conjectures in her favour. Getting back her possessions is another burdensome endeavour as is communication between judicial powers and the family. The Taliban's takeover in 2021 complicates matters even further.
The family's justified distaste for Kabul is reflected in the naturalistic cinematography that paints the capital city with ugly urbanity but captures their rural mountain home with majestic beauty.
However, some visual motifs — fractured shots of a Zahra stand-in and a copy of one of her discredited papers blowing in the wind — feel overly contrived when slotted between the authentic scenes of the Khawari family's daily life.
Still, this is a lyrical film made with deep love, affection and respect for the community — especially since Ilyas Yourish is part of the Hazara diaspora.
With Kamay, he compellingly draws attention to the continued discrimination of women in Afghanistan's systemic structures. He also highlights how harrowing marginalisation can be when their identity intersects with a historically oppressed ethnic group.
Hanna Flint is a British-Tunisian critic, broadcaster and author of Strong Female Character: What Movies Teach Us. Her reviews, interviews and features have appeared in GQ, the Guardian, Elle, Town & Country, Mashable, Radio Times, MTV, Time Out, The New Arab, Empire, BBC Culture and elsewhere
Follow her on Instagram: @hannainesflint