The precocious Hana Makhmalbaf, the youngest member of a distinguished Iranian filmmaking family, joins her father Moshen (Kandahar), mother Marzieh (Stray Dogs) and sister Samira (At Five in the Afternoon) to make a film about life in contemporary Afghanistan.

Star rating: ***
Dir: Hana Makhmalbaf
With: Nikbakht Noruz, Abbas Alijome, Abdolali Hoseinali

The precocious Hana Makhmalbaf, the youngest member of a distinguished Iranian filmmaking family, joins her father Moshen (Kandahar), mother Marzieh (Stray Dogs) and sister Samira (At Five in the Afternoon) to make a film about life in contemporary Afghanistan.

It's a modern-day fable that addresses the ongoing oppression of women and female children in the war-torn, Taliban-dominated country through the simple story of a young girl named Baktay (Nikbakht Noruz) who attempts to put herself through school and get an education. Being a girl, she's summarily thrown out of her local school in the town of Bamiyan, where in 2001 the Taliban destroyed a number of ancient Buddha statues, the atrocious act from which the film takes its title. Thereafter Baktay is harassed by a bunch of boys posing variously as Taliban fighters and the US Army.

Overly didactic in places and occasionally clumsily executed, this is nevertheless a remarkable achievement for the 19-year-old Makhmalbaf.