Niloufar pazira biography of abraham graham

It isn't everyone who can claim to have inspired Mohsen Makhmalbaf with a script idea - and then be asked to portray herself in his extraordinary new film about the lives of Afghan refugees on the Iran-Afghanistan border. Niloufar Pazira tells Rahat Kurd about becoming the production crew's impromptu translator and payroll clerk, bonding with Pashtun women on location - and the unexpected challenge of getting ready for her close-up, chador and all.

Pazira, a journalism graduate of Carleton University, was raised in Kabul and fled Afghanistan in - on foot, over a ten-day journey-- with her parents and siblings.

Woman named Nafas (played superbly by journalist Niloufar Pazira) who fled Afghanistan in favour o f Canada during the civil war, but now finds that she.

Having been a refugee for one year in Pakistan before moving to Canada, she was able to answer him promptly. It was she who met the celebrated director Mohsen Makhmalbaf during a trip to Iran, and told him about her plan to return to Afghanistan. Pazira wanted to find and help a childhood friend in Kabul who was languishing with despair under the Taliban regime, and wanted someone to document the journey.

Makhmalbaf refused - "He told me the only way he makes a film is when his own emotions direct him to the heart of the subject, not someone's request or offer" - but after reading extensively about Afghanistan and traveling there himself, he wrote a screenplay. In the meantime, Pazira says, "We kept in touch.

When I wrote the introduction to the Disability Studies Readerabout ten years ago, I was announc- ing the appearance of a new field of study.

I think it was a year later that he phoned me in Ottawa to tell me he wanted me to come to Tehran. The fictional younger sister was to remain an off-screen presence; the role of the older sister on a rescue mission was written for Pazira. Could she possibly put her Master's thesis at Concordia on hold for a few months? Pazira was blunt: "I left immediately.

While Pazira's attempt to return to Afghanistan provides a thread of narrative continuity, she insists that her role in the film becomes secondary to those of the characters she meets along the way. As a single woman, she cannot travel into the Taliban ruled country without a chaperone or guide. While trying against mounting difficulties to get to Kandahar, she encounters memorable people in extraordinary situations: a vocally gifted young boy scorned by the Taliban; an African-American doctor in search of God; a man whose marriage has been struck by tragedy, yet has not lost its romance.