Nelofer Pazira (photographed in Toronto on July 2)Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
It was a chance encounter by a dusty wall in an Iranian border town that planted a seed in the mind of Afghan-Canadian actress Nelofer Pazira, which has since sprouted into her most ambitious project to date.
Pazira, then 27, was working on the set of Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar when she heard herself summoned. She turned to meet a striking pair of eyes, visible through a small hole in the wall surrounding a nearby house. "Do you want to come inside?" the mystery woman asked. A curious Pazira accepted her invitation.
Inside the woman's home, after having explained she was shooting a film (and then what shooting a film meant), Pazira found the woman was anxious to get her hands on a burka - a shock to Pazira, who loathes the restrictive garment.
"I said to her, if she comes and helps us on the film set, I will give her a burka, but we won't sell it," Pazira, now 36, remembers. "She said, oh, she couldn't leave her house."
The woman's fear of punishment for leaving home without permission ended the encounter, but the conversation lingered in Pazira's mind for years.
Eventually, she fictionalized it as the central event in her new film Act of Dishonour, with one notable difference: the main character, a 15-year-old rural bride-to-be, does venture out to the film set, with disastrous consequences. Through this single, seemingly harmless "sin," Pazira explores notions of honour among families and the pressures exerted on them by staunchly conservative communities dotting the Afghan countryside.
The film's themes should resonate particularly loudly in the West, where appropriate punishments for so-called "honour killings" have become a topic of fierce discussion of late. The goal for Pazira, who considers herself as much a Canadian as an Afghan, was to write a script that's "understood from our [Canadian]perspective, but seen from their perspective."
The film was scouted and shot in late 2008 and early 2009, on either side of the Afghanistan-Tajikistan border. A small Canadian crew was supplemented with Tajik and Afghan locals, partly to keep budgets under control, but also "to create employment" locally, Pazira says. Aside from providing an easier insurance climate, Tajikistan offered local expertise drawn from its strong theatre culture.
Pazira is best known for her starring role in Kandahar, but Act of Dishonour is a project all her own: As well as acting in it, she wrote and directed it, her first such credits for a feature film.
Born in India, Pazira was raised in a relatively liberal household in Kabul, a cosmopolitan city by Afghanistan's standards. Her family friends were mostly professionals and the women she knew lived "uncovered," assuming other women wearing burkas must be "village people."
Still, it was a sheltered life: She watched "tons of fabulous Russian films, most of them black and white," but Kabul had only one TV station that was "packed with propaganda.
"We saw nothing of the West. Everything Hollywood and everything Western was banned," she says while indulging in the French cuisine of a downtown Toronto bistro.
When she was 16, her family fled Afghanistan because of the escalating war with the Soviets, spending a year as refugees in Pakistan before settling in Moncton, N.B.
Even in Canada, her family felt pressure to conform to the Afghan community's social norms. When Pazira moved to study journalism at Carleton University at age 19, the rumour in Ottawa was that her father must have kicked her out. (Though some praised her for "breaking barriers"). Years later, when Kandahar was released in Canada, the phone calls started anew, telling her unapologetic father, "shame on you!" for allowing his daughter to appear in a film.
"In London, there's [been]an explosion of honour killings," Pazira says, shaking her head at recent stories of similarly horrific murders in Canada, including that of Toronto teenager Aqsa Parvez.
But Pazira stresses that it's less the instinct behind this violence that should seem shocking, and more the harsh remedies - death, for example - prescribed by the stricter communal codes of less individualistic societies.
"When we think about the question of honour, we often think it's related to the Eastern world. But the concept of honour is prevalent in all of our lives, all of the time. Nobody wants to be embarrassed in front of others. That's what it all comes down to, basically: being shamed," she says.
Act of Dishonour seeks to personalize that shame, placing it in the hearts and minds of sympathetic but ultimately unforgiving characters, while exploring the conditions for rural Afghan women which Pazira first glimpsed during her family's flight from Kabul.
The main character, Mena, is played by Marina Golbahari, now 19, who was taken in by an Afghan filmmaker after he found her aged 12, illiterate and begging on the streets of Kabul. Golbahari, gifted with natural acting talent, has learned English, and is a budding star of sorts. And she related easily to Pazira's script: When she was younger, her father had refused to let her leave their home.
"I spent a year trying to cast that role," Pazira says. "We always jokingly say that some of the best actors are actually beggars, because they learn from a very young age to be convincing."
Though fortunate to nab Golbahari, Pazira was nevertheless confronted with a world where women still live encircled by walls, glimpsed only rarely by outsiders. Most of the film's women necessarily hailed from the more liberal Tajikistan, and some of them aren't women at all.
"Most of the people under burkas are men because we couldn't find women to be part of the film," Pazira says.