Immediately after the September 11 attacks, New Yorker Taran Davies began shooting this DV portrait (2002, 59 min.) of Afghans in Queens, in Montreal, and in the Northern Alliance villages of Faizabad and Shari Bazurg, hoping to learn how more than two decades of nearly continuous warfare had altered their identity. Among his subjects are a family of six inhabiting a tiny flat in Tajikistan, who fled the Taliban but can’t get visas to join their relatives in Canada; a village elder, who urges emigrants to return, and his son, who was trained as a commando by the Soviets; a regional agent for the UN’s World Food Program; and a member of the royal family who was imprisoned by the Taliban as a CIA spy because he had a camera and laptop computer.
