Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Niaz, an 11-year-old Pashtun boy, asking Agha Jaan, a kite-flying artist, to read a letter from Niaz’s cousin in Peshawar. The cousin describes a recent visit to the cinema. Agha Jaan encourages Niaz to learn to read, explaining that the attainment of knowledge is central to the teachings of Islam. He advises him to learn to use a computer, not a gun. This advice resonates with Niaz, but he says that his father believes computers and television to be Satan’s work.

Educational value points

• The prophet Mohammed encouraged the seeking of knowledge, portrayed in this clip as beginning with the ability to read. Agha Jaan advises Niaz to learn to read and use a computer rather than use a gun. For Niaz learning to read would reduce the frustrations of illiteracy and would honour his deceased mother’s wishes; however, it would also require rejecting his father’s conservative beliefs.

• Niaz’s father is a conservative Muslim, a traditional Pashtun. He holds the belief that school education has no place in society. He objects to Niaz attending a madrassa as he is wary of the religious school’s potential to offer the boy alternatives in life. He is also afraid that modern influences such as computers and television will weaken his son’s beliefs, and lead him away from the understanding that guns are important to Pashtun culture.

• In 2003 UNESCO estimated that within Afghanistan 52 per cent of men and 22 per cent of women over the age of 15 could read and write. Many Pashtun, girls and women especially, have been forbidden access to the skills, knowledge and technology needed to construct a modern Afghanistan. Lack of education contributes to many Pashtun being caught in a cycle of poverty, geographical isolation and tribal hostilities.

• Kite flying is a common pastime in Pashtun society, and children and men compete for the honour of being the best kite flyer. With the aim of ‘killing’ another kite, time and energy goes into creating a winning design and making unbreakable wire. In the clip the solo kite looping and twirling in the blue sky becomes a visual metaphor for the liberation that Agha Jaan suggests education could bring to Niaz.

• The Pashtun are tribal peoples who live in south-eastern Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan. Known for generations as warriors who fiercely defend matters of honour, Pashtun have long been involved in Afghanistan’s history of invasion and war. More recently, the Pashtun are the main ethnic group forming the Taliban, a religious movement that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, exacting an extreme form of conservative Islam.

• It was difficult for the Australian director, Benjamin Gilmour, to make this film as he needed to gain the trust of the Pashtun who have suffered from successive wars and, in recent times, from the oppressive laws of the Taliban. Many, like Niaz’s uncle, have fled to Peshawar in Pakistan, or to countries such as Australia, seeking refuge. While many seek futures free of religious extremism and violence, some in tribal areas remain ready and armed to defend themselves.