MIFF Session 12: THE ORPHANAGE

Kabul 1989. Things are tough. The long Soviet occupation is grinding to a close and it looks like something even worse is coming. A boy wakes in a wrecked car and goes to the cinema for a Bollywood actioner, picking up a few scammed roupees before surrendering himself to the local Orphanage. Things are tough at the interpersonal level as the bullies at the top of the pecking order get their way but overall the kids get by. There's a school attached and they do get a kind of education. The better chess players even get a trip to Moscow out of it but the time for Soviet goodwill gestures is coming to an end as the Mujahideen move in to impose a little hell on earth.

There is little else in terms of plotting in this verite account as the boys and girls work out their various ways of getting through. Whether fighting back bullies with chess or falling into reveries from Bollywood musicals, they forge a kind of life with wizened old Anwar the caretaker keeping a vague order. When the insurgents show up and visit atrocity upon the institution it's time for another Bollywood fantasy but this time we know better.

This is a kind of wish sent back to the present from the time of a defeat to the present. It has a grainy small gauge look to it but the colour pallet is kept vital and warm. The interactions between the kids might well make us wince from the unfairness but we can clearly clap along with them, knowing that only the very worst are that bad and that most will find a kind of triumph. But then we also know that while bad people are apt to do bad things it takes a mindset like religion to make good ones do the same. The finale of this begins as a lament, lifts to a clearly fantastic display of resistance and ends ... well, that's the wish I mentioned. An unassuming but deceptively light neo-realist daydream.