Son of a Lion

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

Small and almost perfectly formed.

More remarkable for its provenance - it's the first film of an Australian ambulance driver- than its modest inherent merits, this unassuming and engrossing docudrama is a useful addition to a small genre of films (

Kandahar, Osama, Turtles Can Fly

) that give us a child's-eye view of that huge dusty slice of the planet where successive United States administrations have been waging the "war on terror".

Gilmour took a shine to Pakistan's northwest frontier while backpacking there before September 11 and says he was inspired to return with a digital video camera and make a movie to counter the "negative stereotyping" of Muslims and Afghans. Whether he succeeds is a moot point: it's at least arguable that it patronises them instead, which is always a danger when well-meaning Europeans dip into foreign cultures.

Certainly he got an eye-opener when he returned with a script: a main character was quickly changed to a widower because no local woman of marriageable age would take part.

It's the story of a sensitive 11-year-old boy Niaz (Shinwari) whose father (Ustad), a proud veteran of the anti-Soviet war, is a gunsmith (their small village rings with weapon-testing reports day and night). The young lad, whose best friend is a poet, wants to go to school in nearby Peshawar but his widower father forbids it and tries in vain to teach him to shoot.

The plotline, such as it is, is that of a pretty prosaic fable (guns bad; books good), but the film, as much an ethnographic documentary as a drama, is full of depictions of daily life - barbering and bread-making and sheep-slaughter - that are ringingly precise (and sometimes unconsciously hilarious: a dentist who plainly doesn't know a milk tooth from an adult tooth seeks a "second opinion" from a chainsmoking colleague).

Gilmour and his local co-cameraman Haroon John nail some fine shots too - of pink skies and purple valleys, of a muezzin's call to prayer - but the film as a whole, though very diverting, is a testament to its maker's tenacity more than his artistry.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Niaz Khun Shinwari, Sher Alam Miskeen Ustad

Director:

Benjamin Gilmour

Running time:

92 mins

Rating:

PG (contains violence) In Pashto with English subtitles