Lifting the Veil Again

NEW YORK — Two months ago, British documentary maker Saira (pronounced Sigh-ra) Shah had just returned from reporting on death squads in Colombia and was casting around for her next project. It wasn’t going to be about Afghanistan.

Today, the 37-year-old Shah, a freelancer who previously worked for Britain’s Channel Four news, has become one of the media names most closely identified with the country, with an extraordinary platform to influence public opinion. She turned out to be in the right place at the right time, as “Beneath the Veil,” her pre-Sept. 11 film on the repression in Afghanistan under its Taliban leaders, went into heavy rotation on CNN in the weeks after the terror attacks, and brought millions of viewers up to speed on a land they had shown scant interest in before.

The daughter of an Afghan scholar, Shah cast her first film as a trip back to her family roots. A book proposal for an even more personal spinoff of “Beneath the Veil,” put together before Sept. 11, was snapped up by publishers around the world, including Knopf in the U.S., which paid a reported $650,000. Her agent says there’s a film option on the table when Shah has a minute to think about it. Shah and her production team were commissioned by Channel Four and CNN to do a second documentary on the country, “Unholy War,” which airs on CNN today at 5 p.m. and Sunday at 8 a.m. and 1, 4 and 8 p.m.

If Shah’s head was turned by the attention, it doesn’t show in “Unholy War.” Her approach is still highly personal and somewhat idiosyncratic; it’s essentially a travelogue--albeit through a devastated country and war zone--of the trip she took with James Miller, the cameraman from the first project, with interviews of everyone they met along the way.

Shah initially didn’t want to believe that the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the U.S. had ties to her father’s homeland. But once the connection became clear, she says, “I realized it was crazy for me to be in London and that I had to go back to Afghanistan,” where, she says, “my concerns have always been and still are, the effects on ordinary people.”

The “ordinary people” include her. To get into Afghanistan for “Unholy War,” Shah and Miller had to hire a guide to smuggle them over the border, instead of hitching a ride on a United Nations plane like the last time. The guide got lost and the team ended up forging a river and trekking through the mountains overnight, at 16,000 feet, in freezing weather. The trip left Shah with mild frostbite and numb lips, which she doesn’t hide as she delivers a slurred commentary for the camera.

“It was scary in a couple ways,” Shah says of the return trip. “Physically, because we were on top of a mountain in the middle of the night, wondering if we would make it till dawn. And scary because I was worried about these individuals I was trying to find, and I didn’t know in what state I’d find them.”

“Unholy War” involved a two-week journey followed by three weeks of rushed editing, whereas “Beneath the Veil” (which CNN is re-airing today at 11 a.m.) was put together over several months. Yet, Shah says, “Unholy War,” “strangely enough, feels more leisurely; we really didn’t have time to do anything except hold up a mirror to the ordinary people we met.”

“Beneath the Veil,” she says, was “frenetic. We were trying to pack loads into it. At that time, everything we said was new and shocking; this one assumes people know more about what’s going on, so we decided to step back from the news a bit and see what’s going on with real people.” Indeed, even though the political situation in Afghanistan has changed rapidly this week, with the routing of Taliban forces from some key cities such as the capital of Kabul, the film, shot earlier, doesn’t feel outdated.

It was the real people that viewers seemed to connect with intensely in Shah’s first Afghanistan film, and Shah has returned the favor and let viewers in on what came next. Several characters from the first documentary are revisited; in particular, Shah and Miller were able to track down three hugely affecting young girls, despite the fact that the girls’ home was on the front line of war.

The three girls had been traumatized while watching Taliban forces enter their remote village and kill their mother, a story they recounted in the original documentary in whispers and nods, as they stared out from their colorful veils with tear-filled eyes. “Unholy War” is essentially a story of the journey to find the girls again and see how they are faring. Shah’s rebuffed attempt to help the girls becomes her metaphor, somewhat obvious but nonetheless apt, for the morass in the country.

Shah says one driving force in her work is anger, seeking out stories that make her mad. She went to Colombia to report on the oil fields and ended up focusing on how death squads terrorize average citizens. Always, she says, she tries to put a face on the people she encounters, whether the Afghans or the sea of refugees surging from Kosovo into Albania.

“One of the aims is to make people think, these aren’t Afghans, or French, or whatever, these are fellow human beings. Editors say to me--not those at CNN--that people don’t care about other people living in foreign countries. But in my experience, people always care when you look at individuals ... when they are allowed to see them, see that they are worried about their child, that they don’t know where the next meal is coming from. Quite often, editors misjudge their viewers.”

For “Unholy War,” the team eventually made its way to the girls’ village, and, Shah says, “They were there in the same courtyard, much as we left them, wrapped in their veils.” The reunion was emotional. “It was one of those times you forgot you were a film crew; that human link comes through with them.”

But the situation was grim, Shah says. The father had four other younger children and no way to earn a living because he feared leaving the family; the girls were frightened to leave the house. In a departure from the standard U.S. journalism practices of staying detached from the subject, Shah says she had always had thought in the back of her mind that she would try to help them, although “not in the crass, jet-you-out-to-America way, but a feeling that as a human being, I had an obligation, somehow, to get involved with these little girls.”

Her idea was to send the girls to school, and conveniently there was a girls’ school just a day’s walk away at a refugee camp. The journalists would rent a house for the family there. “It seemed absolutely perfect,” Shah says.

She recounts what happened next in a self-mocking tone: When they went back to the village, the father refused, saying his house would be looted if it were abandoned. When Shah said they would pay for a new one, he told her it didn’t have a value, because he had built the house the family now lived in himself. If he left the village, he said, he would become an outsider.

The father proposed that they build a girls’ school in the village, which aid workers told Shah was impossible. “And I suddenly realized,” Shah says, “that I was guilty of this huge Western mentality, this idea that I’ll be able to sort out this one little family’s life. I just realized how my preconceptions had been wrong, and what it said about Afghanistan, that it isn’t a place where there is a quick fix. People’s problems are so complex, it’s like unraveling a giant ball of string.”

It’s not enough to get rid of the Taliban and suspected terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, she says. “It’s going to take years and years and years of quiet rebuilding.”

Shah, meanwhile, is feeling a similar entanglement in her life as a result of the activities in recent weeks. “I don’t want to become Mrs. Afghanistan and that’s always a danger,” she says. But she concedes that in Afghanistan, because of her personal connection, there is an extra dimension that has made the two documentaries her best work ever. And she is about to embark on writing the book, a story she is eager to tell.

“I think it will be cathartic. I have had a personal lifetime involvement with Afghanistan and it will be a wonderful thing to have a chance to take a breath and work through it.”

Loquacious when talking about the making of the film, Shah seems reluctant to go into too much detail about how she feels personally about the last two months. “It’s hard to tell how it will change my life. The story isn’t over yet. If there’s peace next year, I’d like to go live there for a year. But it’s hard to tell where Afghanistan or my life is going.”

“Unholy War” airs on CNN today at 5 p.m. and Sunday at 8 a.m. and 1, 4 and 8 p.m. There will be an encore presentation of “Beneath the Veil” at 11 a.m. today on CNN.