THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Ten years ago, Czech filmmaker Michaela Pavlatova directed an erotic animated film for the second time, the short movie Tram, in which a tram driver brightened up her journeys by giving way to her fantasies. Absorbed by the phallic euphoria of its occupant, the cockpit was transformed into a naughty shop where the buttons and levers now acted as sex toys.
Today at the head of the animation department of the prestigious Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Michaela Pavlatova surprises with a radically different animated feature film, my afghan family, located in Kabul, during the first decade of the 2000s, after the fall of the Taliban regime. On closer inspection, we find in this film his taste for the precise evocation of the details of everyday life and the sensory discovery of landscapes. Under the sun, the chain of high mountains of the Hindu Kush seems to have been covered, thanks to a digital brush, with a sheet of gold as luminous as it is burning.
By contrast, the film opens under gray skies. In Prague, Helena, a Czech economics student, suffers from loneliness and dreams of having a large family. While none of the geeks in her class meet her expectations, she catches the eye of Nazir, a student of Afghan origin who arouses her curiosity. So she decides to leave everything to follow the one who will become her husband, thereby renouncing the freedoms offered to her by Western society. If the boy is more progressive than the other members of his family, the fact remains that his culture will force Helena (now Herra) to make heavy concessions.
Acculturation
Adaptation of the Czech novel Freshta (2012), by Petra Prochazkova (the last war journalist to have spoken to Commander Massoud before his assassination), the film does not dwell on the political markers of the time, except for the death of Osama bin Laden, broadcast on television, to focus on the acculturation of Herra: it is in his desire to integrate at all costs into an uncomfortable world, but within a united family, that lies all his finesse.
Torn between her quest for freedom (she supports her niece Roshangol, a teenager who refuses to marry a 40-year-old man) and the balance of her marital relationship, she becomes a witness and actor of the upheavals to come and adopts a new way to live, linked to her status as a wife subordinate to her husband: no longer speaking in his name, not attending the work meetings of the heads of the family, not being alone in a room with a man, and spending a lot of time in an antechamber with the other women of his family.
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