Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival

“A deceptively muted – and then climactically explosive – broadside against the Taliban set in the Afghani province of Bamian” (Andrew Nayman, Eye Weekly).

From the mighty Makhmalbaf filmmaking clan comes a film that further enriches the strong tradition of child protagonists in Iranian cinema. Made (amazingly) by eighteen-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf, daughter of veteran, acclaimed director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame is a wonderfully sly parable that explores serious subject matter through a child’s perspective, at times entering a world of make-believe that is equally exhilarating and terrifying.

Young Bakhtay decides she will at all costs go to school, and sets out on an odyssey that pits the obstinate girl (barely older than a toddler) against numerous, seemingly insurmountable obstacles, including, most ominously, a band of boys pretending to be the Taliban. Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame is a superbly imagined and deeply felt political allegory of the impossible situation facing ordinary Afghani civilians.

Program notes by George Kaltsounakis