Jason C
Reviewer

      An ongoing feeling of dread and fear permeates through each scene of the Golden Globe-winning “Osama”. From the desperate looks of women locked into cages like animals to the shrieks of “The Taliban is coming!” that send women and children alike running for their lives down the dusty streets of Afghanistan, this film brings an otherwise clueless world into lives of quiet desperation.
 
     Far from focusing on the notorious leader bin Laden, this “Osama” focuses on the life of a 12-year-old girl, played brilliantly by newcomer Marina Golbahari. In interviews, director Siddiq Barmak said he spent months searching Afghanistan to find the perfect lead, and his time and effort were deeply rewarded in Golbahari’s nuanced performance. Yet this film is not about her as much as it is about what happens to her, and how her life flips upside down in order to prevent her family from starving.
 
     Under Taliban law, women have no right to education and cannot even leave home without a male escort. The penalty? Death. So when the girl’s father and brother are both killed in armed conflicts, the girl must cut her hair and become a boy in order to earn enough wages to support her family.
 
     Each time women are herded like cattle, or in one instance when a woman is stoned for “spreading profanity,” one must remember this is not an Orwellian tale of what the world could become one day in a different society. This is the way women live in Afghanistan. And as soon as the audience adjusts to this fact, it becomes even more terrifying.
 
     When Osama (the name the girl takes when she becomes a boy) begins working for a shopkeeper, she is drafted into the Taliban. This draft consists of Taliban members dragging boys from their working lives through the streets so they can learn to pray, wear turbans and wash themselves appropriately. In this forced boot camp, Osama continually makes stupid mistakes that will make you want to slap her. She continues to talk in a high voice, she climbs a tree and then cries when she thinks she’ll fall and she walks into where everyone is bathing when she should have just stayed where she was.
 
     “Osama” is not for the squeamish, but it is a film that needs to be seen. To think that women can be treated this badly boggles the mind. But that’s the American mind—one that would most likely commit suicide if forced into a life of subordination where death is the only escape. But throughout each scene, one question remains: In a society ready to kill a journalist for videotaping Taliban activities, how was a film as true to life as this even made?