Shortly after the Bamian Buddha statues were destroyed, Taliban authorities started paying regular visits to Afghan Films, the government-run national film studio and archives. The studio, built with U.S. assistance, has been making newsreels, documentaries and feature films since 1968 and preserving films produced earlier. It had a library of at least 1,000 films until Taliban police showed up and had a bonfire last spring.


A storage hut at the studio is still filled with a spaghetti-like jumble of films that Taliban members pulled from their canisters and tossed on the ground. The ground is still scorched from where the Taliban’s men burned a huge pile of films.
What they did not know was that the studio’s eight remaining employees — of the 160 who once worked there — had anticipated the police visit and hidden as many films as they could. They stuffed them in broken cameras, behind sound equipment, in the far corners of abandoned storerooms. They destroyed the electrical system in the building so there would be no lights to help the Taliban members conduct their search.
“They were all illiterate, and they didn’t know how many films we had,” said Abdul Jamil Sarwar, 54, the studio’s director. “They told us that if they found any more films, they would arrest us and put us in prison. But they didn’t find any.”
Now the studio’s frigid screening room is again buzzing with films that survived — little pieces of Afghanistan’s visual history. A documentary shows rival mujahedeen, or holy warriors, bombarding Kabul into near-oblivion in the early 1990s. An old newsreel shows King Mohammed Zahir Shah, now in exile in Rome, arriving on the White House lawn and greeting President John F. Kennedy.
“We have worked here for 35 years,” Sarwar said. “We had to try to save these films even though it was dangerous because this is our life’s work. It’s not brave, it’s our job.”

© 2002 The Washington Post Company



 

The Taliban guys' job was to destroy films, and, sadly, they apparently did so effectively (at least to those they found).

The "candy cretins'" job is to show films properly, and they often fail misrably.

Who does their job worse?