Worlds Away From Hollywood, a Young Star Under the Veil

Wednesday, March 3, 2004
By Carlotta Gall

New York Times Writer

Marina went with her parents and two of her sisters to see "Osama" when it was first shown at the Kabul Cinema, one of the few working movie houses here. "I did not like it because it showed the times of the Taliban," she said. "My mother, father and sisters went to see it," she added. "They liked my acting, but when they put me down the well, my father fainted. My mother was also upset when they put me down the well. My sisters were saying: `Well done! Well done! How did you dare go down the well?'" If the filming sometimes made Marina cry, it was also fun and empowering for a girl once accustomed to begging. Her fee, slight by American standards, was an above average salary for Afghanistan. "I earned $110 a month while I was filming, and then we bought the house," she said.

Marina Golbahari, 13, starred in the award-winning "Osama" but remains poor in Kabul.

Image Credit: The Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan -- NYT
Marina Golbahari, the star of the award-winning Afghan film "Osama," is the envy of her classmates. She flaunts a new silky outfit and high-heeled black boots and says three of her school friends want to be in the movies, too.

Yet her life has not changed dramatically since the Afghan film director Siddiq Barmak spotted her scavenging on the street one day about a year ago.

Despite the new clothes, Marina, 13, still looks much like the poor Kabuli child she was then. She is skinny, her hands rough, her face marked by sores. And though her family has moved into a two-room house bought with the help of Mr. Barmak and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an Iranian director who helped finance "Osama," Marina refuses requests to be interviewed at her home. She is embarrassed by its meager state and a little afraid of her father, who does not like visits from foreigners.

"We are living in very bad conditions, and when the rain and snow come, the roof leaks and drips everywhere," Marina said through an interpreter in an interview one afternoon at her school here. "When guests come, there is no room for them to stay overnight."

Though she and her seven siblings no longer beg on the streets, the family survives mostly on the $4 to $6 a day that her father earns from his street stall selling music cassettes. The children spend their mornings at a government school and their afternoons at a charitable school for poor neighborhood children, who get a daily meal and some basic classes there. Still, Marina, like Afghanistan itself, has come a long way.

Marina Golbahari on the set of "Osama," the Afghan film in which she plays a girl posing as a boy.

Image Credit: Courtesy of Elsa Leroy

When Mr. Barmak first asked her to sing for him, she thought he was going to offer her and her family some help, she recalled. But he wanted her to star in his film, the first feature made in Afghanistan since the fundamentalist Taliban movement, now ousted, took over Kabul in 1996, banning films, television and music.

(More: NYTimes.com / Movies)

2004 © The New York Times Company.

Dan