Earth and Ashes

Earth and Ashes, based on director Atiq Rahimi’s novella of the same name, is both spare and suffocating, a portrait of a grandfather’s unavailing determination set against the quiet tension of wartime. Dastaguir and his newly-deafened grandson Yassin, departing a village hollowed out by Russian bombs, traverse an unforgiving desert terrain to reach Dastaguir’s son, Murad, a laborer at a coal mine. Together, they bear the weight of a tragic mission: delivering to Murad the message that their home village has been destroyed, and they are among their family’s sole survivors.

In this story of fathers and sons and the physical consequences of war, Atiq Rahimi manages to condense recent history into a stark, deliberate handful of days.

(Atiq Rahimi, Afghanistan & France, 2004, 102 minutes, 35mm)

Fazel Ahad Ahadi is a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. He completed his undergraduate studies in the Department of Dramatic Literature at the University of Kabul and received a master's degree in Cultural Studies with a concentration in Cinema from the Mirza Tursunzade University of Culture and Arts in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Ahadi is a poet, playwright, screenwriter, and mentor who has trained a generation of Afghan screenwriters. He has published in Persian several collections of poetry and numerous books and articles, most concerning cinema.