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Currently On Sale
On Sale 2006 - Archive
Viva Pedro Returns!
SE: Inland Empire
Next Gen.: Affleck
YFF: Bad Company
Spanish Cinema Now
FCS: Charles Grodin
SE: Alan Arkin
IN: kabul transit
SE: For Your Consideration
Janus Films
Two from Lebanon
U.S. vs Lennon
Prairie Home
GS: Head over Heels
Anne Fontaine
Lulu Forever
Leo Awards
Kaufman Brothers
Film & Citizenship
Sensations in Sound
Next Gen.: Scorsese
Austrian Cinema
YFF: Nosferatu
IN: Home
Hungarian Cinema
Avant Garde
LatinBeat
OC: Miami Vice
A Killer Life
Emergence
Sholay
YFF: Factotum
Russian Fantastik
The Lift Project
GS: A Cottage on...
IN: Manhattan Kansas
RockDocs
Judy Holliday
SE: A Scanner Darkly
Heroic Grace II
Shaw Bros Classics
Scanners: NY Video Fest
Flying Daggers
OC: Touch the Sound
FCS: The Descent
OC: Superman Returns
Benoît Jacquot
Human Rights Watch
The Unburied Man
OC: United 93
YFF: Big Night
IN: Holy Modal
Syrian Cinema
Balanchine
Klimov & Shepitko
FCS: Pine Flat
Irving Berlin
New Italian Cinema
Kieslowski Series
YFF: Salaam Bombay!
African Film Festival
GS: The Eagle
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With its title is suggesting both its subject and its style, kabul transit presents a portrait of a fragmented country in transition via a glancing,
observational look at its capital city and environs at a very particular moment in its history. For centuries a crossroads of trade, Afghanistan has been frequently invaded and plundered. Its more recent decades of Soviet occupation, civil war, Taliban rule, and the U.S. and "allied" bombing and invasion post-9/11 have left it a physically devastated landscape with inhabitants both shell-shocked and resilient and at once grateful, resentful, and wary of the new occupiers.
A radio voice calmly reassures that terrorists sow the seeds of their own defeat, while a city official listens to a sales pitch for expensive new fire equipment that can also safely disperse demonstrators and wonders who will pay for it. A spiritual healer dispenses an amulet to keep a young man's car from breaking down while an herbalist laments the shorter life expectancy of Afghan men and young university women question whether Afghans are really being rescued from oppression. NATO soldiers supervise the repair of a sewage system and the building of a school as children play in the ghostly remains of a bombed-out Soviet concert hall.
Eschewing narration, and using minimal titles to denote the location of each scene, filmmakers David Edwards, Gregory Whitmore, and Maliha Zulfarar assemble a mosaic of images and experiences that convey the sorrow, black humor, irony, and surprising hope that can exist in the most untenable of situations.
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Thurs Nov 30: 6:30pm
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