A deadly serious moment almost comical in its contradictions, the opening scene of the Afghan film Osama features a protest conducted entirely by women clad in burkas. Unable to show their faces, they do their best to make their voices heard, chanting and carrying signs that read, "We are not political, we are hungry." It's easy to understand the anger of widows living under a regime that gives all women few options, and unattached women virtually none. The moment the Taliban arrives, however, the protest ends. The only people who can implement change remain not only unwilling to listen, but quick to use violence to maintain the silence. The first narrative feature from Afghan director Siddiq Barmak, and the first to be made in Afghanistan since the Taliban's collapse, Osama looks back on the recent past with an anger that's already fading into sadness. The focus falls on two characters at the fringe of the protest, widowed mother Zubaida Sahar and her 12-year-old daughter (Marina Golbahari). For Sahar, a medical worker, the restrictions have had an especially devastating effect: Not only can she no longer earn money for her family, but she now has to watch others' suffering without helping. Sensing a way to end one problem, she cuts Golbahari's hair, dresses her as a boy, and sends her to earn a meager living with a sympathetic employer. When forces begin gathering young boys for a Taliban-sponsored school, however, the employment gets cut short and Golbahari must continually defend the masculine pose that gives her a place in her country's new order. Shot episodically as funding and supplies arrived from the Iranian Ministry Of Culture and the Makhmalbaf Film House, Osama bears the stamp of its neighbors' influence, letting non-professional actors and graceful, spare camerawork create drama from everyday circumstances. They don't have to work too hard. Effective as a drama as it spirals Golbahari deeper into her nightmarish world, Osama is similarly powerful as a fictionalized account of the Taliban's obscene wish for a world where the stringent enforcement of religious laws took the place of instinctual human kindness. Put the enforcers in foil suits and helmets, and they'd resemble a society from a heavy-handed '50s science-fiction story, but this happened here on Earth, not long ago and not that far away.