A guided tour of human misery set inside the Taliban regime, Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar (The Sun Behind The Moon) was born from the sense of hopelessness reflected in the completed film. Unable to assist a Canadian woman of Afghan birth who was concerned about the mounting desperation of a friend she left in Afghanistan, Makhmalbaf decided to help in the manner most familiar to him: by making a film. Converting fact into fiction, he enlisted the story's inspiration, Neloufar Pazira, as his lead, recasting her slightly as a woman searching for a landmine-maimed sister who vowed to commit suicide during the last eclipse of the 20th century. Almost from her first stop, a refugee community along the Iran/Afghanistan border, Pazira begins to sense that her quest will be even more difficult than expected. Bribing a man to allow her to pose as one of his wives proves easy enough, but she soon discovers that neither the money that confirms her as an outsider nor the camouflage of a burqa designed to deny women any sense of individuality will protect her, should she attract the attention of the nearly indistinguishable bands of thieves and government patrols. Makhmalbaf lets her journey unfold, like Apocalypse Now, as a series of episodes centered on increasingly distressing interruptions in her journey. The moments he captures cumulate in a vision of a country as hostile to conventional notions of freedom as the darkest science-fiction dystopia. In a school, boys crowded together with little breathing room alternate chanted verses from the Koran with poetic descriptions of weaponry their instructors have required them to commit to memory. Even this existence seems relatively luxurious compared to that of the landmine victims at a Red Cross outpost, who impatiently await, some for up to a year, for artificial legs. When sets strapped to parachutes begin dropping unexpectedly from the sky, Makhmalbaf undermines the potentially miraculous moment by framing his shot to show that the would-be recipients outnumber the limbs. (The director chose to use regional non-actors for the film, which makes the moment all the more discomfiting.) Though less elegant and less formally challenging than many of Makhmalbaf's previous works, Kandahar has a uniquely brutal power. In the past, the director has employed surrealism to burrow toward truths obscured by the niceties of culture and history. The Taliban-ruled Afghanistan presents no such need. It lets its fears and prejudices, particularly those directed at women, play in the open. "One day the world will see your troubles and come to your aid," a teacher informs a line of girls being forced to return to Afghanistan, and give up school in the process. While other circumstances led to the Taliban's ouster, at least now her prediction sounds more like a challenge than the sort of false hope slipped to children to help them sleep.