Three Songs for Benazir

For Elizabeth and Gulistan Mirzaei, the filmmaking couple behind the documentary Three Songs for Benazir, the plight of Kabul’s refugees hits very close to home. While they were aiding humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan, Elizabeth and Gulistan (Laila at the Bridge) began developing a friendship with Shaista, a young man in a Kabul refugee camp. The pair, who have directed films for Al Jazeera and the BBC, have a deep history in the region: Gulistan is himself Afghan and Elizabeth spent over a decade living in the country. “I saw myself in Shaista; we both [had been] displaced by war in Afghanistan,” says Gulistan. “We are both poor. I lost my father during the Soviet-Afghan War and I became a refugee in Iran. Shaista lost his family member, too, in the war between America and the Taliban.” Over the next ten years, the Mirzaeis filmed Shaista, who introduced them to his wife, Benzair, and the stunning love story of Three Songs for Benazir was born. 

The Mirzaeis’ Oscar-nominated short film redefines romantic love, following the young couple as they begin a family, share their dreams, and wade through daily life in a camp for displaced people. “We started this in 2013. At the time we had talked about wanting to film the story of him and Benazir, but also his desire to join the Afghan National Army and be the first one in his tribe and camp to join,” says Elizabeth. “That’s how we thought the film was actually going to unfold, and it was really shattering for us to see how it took a different turn.” When Shaista approaches his elders about joining the army, they won’t allow it. “If you join, the Taliban will chop us into pieces,” says his father. This is devastating for Shaista, as he needs a signed guarantor to enlist. “There are very few examples that I can think of [in Western culture] where a grown man really can’t make a decision for his life the way that happened to Shaista,” Elizabeth shares. 

From there, the story takes a more heartbreaking route; Shaista must continue working the opium fields, a job shared by many living in the camp, and he eventually succumbs to the drug’s addictive nature. By the end of the story, we find Shaista recovering and in good spirits in an addiction treatment facility, where Benzair and their two children visit him. “Last night I dreamed about you the whole night, and now my restless heart is at peace,” he tells her. Then, as he has done throughout their courtship, he sings her a song. 

The tenderness of Three Songs for Benzair is not what we’re used to finding in films set in wartime Afghanistan, and that was the point for the Mirzaeis and their producer Omar Mullick (These Birds Walk). “I watch this film and I second guess all the mainstream drivel that’s out there that passes for romantic in my western culture,” says Mullick. “This is actually a really healthy antidote, and offers me something potentially even better.” 

Here the Mirzaeis and Mullick discuss the importance of Three Songs for Benazir’s story and its journey to fruition with Farihah Zaman, the documentary director, producer, and Director of Grants and Programs at Brown Girls Doc Mafia.

Farihah Zaman: How did you, Elizabeth and Gulistan, come to know the family that’s at the center of the film, and at what point did you think, This is a story that really needs to be documented and shared?

Gulistan Mirzaei: I’m from Afghanistan, and I wanted to make a film in my own voice and through my own lens. 12 years ago, Elizabeth and I met Shaista in the camp. We became very good friends. Shaista and I had a deep connection because of our life experience.

Elizabeth Mirzaei: We were distributing food in the camp with this humanitarian project at the time. We were so drawn to Shaista as a person, and the curiosity and wonder that he had for the world, and his music and songs, and from that blossomed this friendship that has lasted now for many years. But it was three years before we even started to film with him at all.

What drew us was this love story in a region that you don’t typically associate with love stories and how Afghanistan is usually set up in this framework of war and news. And even though it’s portrayed in big Hollywood films, it’s got a certain kind of color palette associated with it that makes you see the region and the people a certain way. We really wanted to upend those stereotypes just by this quiet love story between a couple.

FZ: Elizabeth, I understand you were also the cinematographer. Expand a little bit about the aesthetic that you chose and the visual language of the film. 

EM: It was really intuitive. I just pointed the camera where I felt drawn to it and a lot of it was these small details because, while there’s a war raging on outside, it’s the small moments that become the most pronounced and beautiful and acute because you realize how fragile existence is. 

I was in Afghanistan for many years — of course, Gulistan is from there and he lost his father — we both lost many friends there. When you live so close to a war, it’s these little moments that are elevated to become the most important moments of your life.

In terms of visual motifs in the film, the security balloon was important to us, just in the sense that it represents this disconnect in war and the vast gulf between the lived experience of the people in the war and those who are either making policies or sending people to fight the war.

FZ: Gulistan, what did it mean to be able to share a story from your country when the images that we see are typically from the news media, or from this kind of surveillance? 

GM: It’s important to me to tell a story of my country. I work with many foreign journalists; a lot of them don’t know my language or my culture. And news is always negative. A lot of the stories I see are typical: always war and violence and guns. But my country is so much more than that. My homeland is beautiful; my people are resilient. As an Afghan filmmaker, I want to tell a surprising love story and change how people think about my country.

FZ: I really appreciated what love looks like in the film. We have these ideas about what it means to be in love and what a good marriage looks like, and you captured something that really goes beyond that. Even as a Bangladeshi person, something that I related to is that there are ways that my parents loved each other that I want to understand differently. Could you talk about the small moments that you observed and wanted to make sure came through in the film?

EM: We were so compelled by Shaista’s character, but then he introduced us to Benazir too and it was [special] what happened between them in the room together. She was really strong, quiet, modest, stoic in some ways, but she would also just dissolve into giggles when he would serenade her with these songs. There was such a tenderness and playfulness between them that were, for us, actually the most beautiful moments to film between them.

FZ: I know you were friends already, but it’s still challenging to film those kinds of intimate relationship moments with close friends. Can you talk about how your relationship developed? 

EM: After we met Shaista, we had spent a lot of time with him and his family, so they really got to trust us; we got to trust them, too. There were times that we went to the Ministry of Refugees with them because they were trying to get better access to resources, water supply, and electricity. We would accompany people to the hospital, like some of Shaista’s relatives, because even in Kabul, they’re very marginalized, and we saw firsthand in the hospital the way that they were treated there.

So, when we asked Shaista if we could just start filming with him, it wasn’t really a big discussion. He was like, Yeah, just bring your camera and film, and I think it took a little bit of time for Benazir to get comfortable with us filming, but for a period of three years, off and on, we would stop in at the camp and film a little bit with Shaista and Benazir pretty much every week, for just short periods of time, and then go back to our other jobs.

FZ: The relationship between Shaista and his father: It might be easy to look at that and say, Well, he’s not supportive of his goals. But I was really struck by the moment that Shaista says, “We’ll either be bombed by the foreigners or killed by the Taliban.” Living with that feeling constantly, can you contextualize a little bit of where some of Shaista’s family members were coming from, what the stakes are in him deciding to join the army?

EM: It’s an interesting idea about what danger is and what safety is. For a Westerner to see this, they would think, Of course it would be safer to join the Afghan National Army than it would be to work for the Taliban in an opium field that’s fraught with danger. But really the idea of what’s safe and what’s dangerous depends on where you live and where you stand in situations. For his family, just joining the army represented the much greater danger to work with the government than it would be to work for the Taliban in the poppy fields. 

So, Shaista’s father, he’s not a villain. He just wanted to do what was best or easiest for his son, and an American audience seeing the film has something to gain perspective on — since we in the United States place such an emphasis on rugged individualism and self determination really being this ultimate good. In other countries, the role that family expectations and culture and tradition play in your decision-making would be insightful for an American audience. 

FZ: Omar, I would love to take a minute to talk about your involvement in the project, how you met Elizabeth and Gulistan, and what drew you to engage with this film.

Omar Mullick: Despite being ethnically Pashtun on both sides and being in and out of the region for over two decades and following the tug in the blood, as a lot of diaspora people do, this diamond in the rough sat languishing in my inbox for a long time. 

Even for someone like me, I thought, Oh, it may be another sad story from the region, and I’ve seen this before. Which is a long-winded way of saying how pervasive some of the stereotypes that you’ve rightfully flagged are, and they can even pollute people who are well-intentioned and from [the region]. When I climbed off my backside and actually watched [the film] these poor two souls (the Mirzaeis) couldn’t get rid of me.

I’m now a Swiss army knife trying to help get as many eyes on it and get people past some of the things I experienced, which is that, Oh, I think I’ve probably seen something like that before. Well you haven’t, with this film.

FZ: It’s the irony, sometimes, that in order to understand and appreciate and feel empathy for someone’s life more deeply, we need to de-center the context that has always been provided. Gulistan and Elizabeth, how did you find the balance of reflecting the extent to which war is part of their lives but not the entirety of their lives? In what ways did you bring in that history and where did you say, “No it’s really about them. We need to focus on their day-to-day life”?

EM: The film does try to thematically juggle a number of other issues, like the ongoing war and displacement, instability and security, the drug economy — why you would end up in that, and why you might join the A.N.A. It tries to touch on these in a subtle way because that is the context in which the film exists and that’s the world that we lived in in Afghanistan too. But we really wanted to keep this as a love story and have that as the engine that drives it. That’s something that we’ve really ached as filmmakers to be able to show — what happens inside homes while the war is outside: the beauty and the humor, and the intimacy and tenderness, and the love. And how love compels you to try to build something, even in uncertain circumstances.

OM: Farihah, you spoke about your parents and reframing how romance and love happens, and I think that it’s actually a pretty profound observation about this culture because in the west we so rarely self critique. The finger’s typically wagging at these other cultures. And even the best intentions are like, Oh, you’ll catch up and we’ll help bring you over here.

This film actually very quietly and very beautifully challenges how we view romance and it’s actually like, Are you really that romantic? 

FZ: It asks us to expand our understanding. I appreciated that you didn’t handhold too much about context, including the love story, and the political context. Who do you want to watch this film and what do you hope to impart to them?

EM: We would love Afghans to watch the film. Shaista has seen it on WhatsApp; he’s really excited for the film to go out into the world and his story to be shared in all these countries. He said he wanted to actually have a little party and play music. He seemed so happy about it. So it’s really a film that we dedicated to Afghanistan and to the Afghan people.

I think it’s also important for us that a global audience sees this film, to see Afghanistan in a different way, to better understand the realities on the ground, that there’s a cost to human life on the ground in Afghanistan and to relate to this story through the unlikely characters of these teenagers in love in a displacement camp.

GM: I hope to see, in my country, a love story, you know? Not always war, or guns.

EM: There are a lot of beautiful proverbs in Dari and Pashto, two of the main languages of Afghanistan. We speak Dari. A lot of them deal with hope. And I think that’s a lot of what this film is. “Doonya ba omeed zenda ast” [in English], “The world is alive with hope” is one of the proverbs that we like. Shaista has hope, right? If he didn’t have hope, what does he have?

And if there’s no hope at all, then why are we making this film; why is any of this possible? You can recognize the harsh reality of life in Afghanistan and we’re not there, but we hear about it from all of Gulistan’s family that’s really struggling, and Shaista and Benazir as well. But hope can coexist alongside these feelings of sorrow. You have to have hope, otherwise you don’t have anything.