This new doc­u­men­tary is Afghanistan’s answer to Boyhood

In 2004, direc­tor Phil Grab­sky made a splash on the fes­ti­val cir­cuit with The Boy Who Plays on the Bud­dhas of Bamiyan. The doc­u­men­tary fol­lows eight-year-old Mir as he and his fam­i­ly carve out a hum­ble exis­tence among the caves behind the remains of the Bud­dhas of Bamiyan, once the world’s tallest stone sculp­tures which were destroyed by the Tal­iban in 2001.

Sev­en­teen years and anoth­er fea­ture doc­u­men­tary (2011’s The Boy Mir) lat­er, Grab­sky returns to his sub­ject for a third time. Join­ing forces with Afghan jour­nal­ist Shoaib Shar­i­fi, Grab­sky and his team con­tin­ue to fol­low Mir as he enters adult­hood, leaves the caves of Bamiyan and goes to Kab­ul with his wife and chil­dren to find work. Although Mir has already been the sub­ject of two pre­vi­ous fea­tures, My Child­hood, My Coun­try begins again in 2002 when Grab­sky first start­ed film­ing with the fam­i­ly, a curi­ous deci­sion which over­writes the exis­tence of the two pre­vi­ous documentaries.

Against the remote Afghan land­scape Mir’s child­hood is marked by both joy and hard­ship. His par­ents send him to school, although he soon has to drop out to sup­port his fam­i­ly by work­ing the land. Amer­i­can fight­er jets fly over­head, pro­vid­ing an amus­ing dis­trac­tion for the boy, while a pair of don­keys become his ​“motor­bike” and ​“plane.” Between these touch­ing domes­tic scenes, Grab­sky and Shar­i­fi cut to news footage cov­er­ing the war in Afghanistan, a jux­ta­po­si­tion which high­lights the pre­car­i­ous yet strange­ly mun­dane nature of liv­ing in a warzone.

Film­ing a per­son over the course of their life has inher­ent con­se­quences. For exam­ple, Mir’s wife first heard of her future hus­band as the local ​“movie star”. Still, it is com­mon to hear film­mak­ers freely admit­ting to inter­ven­tion, which Grab­sky and Shar­i­fi do when Mir and his fam­i­ly move to Kab­ul and are unable to find work. On-screen text explains that the film­mak­ers helped to find Mir a job as a cam­era­man, some­thing their sub­ject showed an inter­est in as a young boy.

This inter­ven­tion shapes more than the film’s nar­ra­tive: on his way to film­ing the after­math of a sui­cide bomb­ing, Mir nar­row­ly miss­es a sec­ond explo­sion because he stops to find a mem­o­ry card. When a doc­u­men­tary is set in a coun­try which is har­bour­ing the reper­cus­sions of a for­eign impe­r­i­al force, choos­ing not to explore the ethics of a West­ern film pro­duc­tion inter­ven­ing with their sub­ject feels like a missed opportunity.

My Child­hood, My Coun­try is marked­ly dif­fer­ent from Grabsky’s ear­li­er doc­u­men­taries because Mir, now in his twen­ties, is able to film him­self as well as pro­vide voiceover which accom­pa­nies the ear­ly footage of his child­hood. This frame­work, which gives Mir an oppor­tu­ni­ty to reflect on his own life, is a wel­come addi­tion, yet the deci­sion to squeeze 20 years into just 90 min­utes does the film’s pac­ing no favours. Nev­er­the­less, this is a fas­ci­nat­ing exam­ple of pro­tract­ed film­mak­ing and a refresh­ing counter nar­ra­tive to those which typ­i­cal­ly sur­round the War on Terror.