the giant buddhas: a brilliant doc

Anyone who has ever attended the San Francisco International Film Festival knows that selecting films to see is akin to rolling the dice. After viewing a couple of decent, though ultimately unsatisfying narrative films last Sunday, I got lucky today with a documentary, The Giant Buddhas, by Swiss director Christian Frei.

Frei tells the story of the Taliban's destruction of the stone Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan from a multiplicity of persepectives: Sayyed (pictured above), who belongs to a refugee group that lived in the caves near the Buddhas, until the Taliban wiped out most of the clan; an Al Jazeera reporter who risked his life to document the demolition of the Buddhas; Xuanzang, a Chinese monk from the 7th century whose journey from China to India took him to the valley where the Buddhas once stood (in his journal he not only describes two Buddhas but also a third reclining statue that perhaps has gone undiscovered for centuries); Dr. Tarsi, an Afghan archaeologist, a university professor in France, who organizes a dig to discover the missing 300-meter-long Buddha; and Nelofer Pazira, an Afghan/Canadian author and actress who lives in Toronta and travels back to her homeland to visit the site where the Buddhas once stood and retrace family history.

Okay, that turned into more of a summary than I'd like. But I wanted to hint at this documentary's marvelous complexity. What is harder to convey is how emotionally moving it was. I recall reading in The New Yorker about the Taliban's decimation of the Buddhas and being terribly affected and saddened by the wanton destruction of the statues and being frightened by the intolerance of their actions. Frei, with a very even-handed voiceover, tells the story of these statues and the fallout from religious fundamentalism, as he travels to locations in Afghanistan and China. This film manages to be very affecting without ever coming close to being polemic. Don't miss it, if you get the chance to see it.