Osama

UPDATE 1/12/24: Due to inclement weather, the Film Studies Center will be postponing tonight's screening of Osama, now to take place on Friday, January 19, at 7pm. The film will screen as planned on 35mm at the Logan Center Screening Room, with Fazel Ahad Ahadi joining us for a pre-show introduction and post-show discussion.

Inspired by a true story, Osama is the startling first feature film from celebrated Afghan director Siddiq Barmak, a narrative that centers itself in the story of three generations of women who have been deeply affected by the emergence of Taliban rule. When the Taliban shuts down operations at a hospital, a 12-year-old girl and her mother are put out of work. Legally prohibited from leaving the home unaccompanied by a man, daughter and mother are confronted with the increasingly suffocating strictures on everyday life; with both the mother’s husband and brother dead, no one remains to support the two women and their grandmother. With nowhere left to turn, the girl’s mother hatches a desperate plan to disguise her daughter as a boy. Now answering to “Osama,” the daughter treads an uneasy path; with every passing day that the ruse is maintained, she worries it is only a matter of time before her true identity is discovered.  (Siddiq Barmak, Afghanistan, 2003, 83 min., 35mm) 

Presented by Cinema and Media Studies, Scholars at Risk and Film Studies Center, with support from The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. 35mm print courtesy of the DGA Motion Picture Industry Conservation Collection at the UCLA Film & Television Archive 

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 born 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.