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This piece takes place on the outskirts of Kabul, where the landscape is littered with the detritus of more than 20 years of war and the continued destruction of the land due to bombings etc. It‘s not unusual to see children playing around sometime within the carcasses of the planes and tanks lying like dead birds fallen from the sky. These are uncanny sights because the presence of these metallic giants is a symbol of sorts for the presence of the physical and psychological traumas of wars that have defined the history of Afghanistan for almost three decades now. (Lida Abdul)
Lida Abdul generates subtle, deeply impressive cinematic parables by using formal precision and minimal cuts. Against the backdrop of Afghanistan’s sparse landscape, she presents formula-like actions whose simple structure is what makes a strong impression, offering an open, hopeful view outside of mass media images. ... Returning to the country of her early childhood and youth after years of exile, Abdul develops a stylistic means with her cinematic parables that enables a highly sensitive and likewise powerful artistic confrontation with the country, so heavily marked by war. Since a religiously-shaped world view and the resulting massive social pressure prohibit her from including women in her films, she prefers to use children as protagonists. In In Transit, a flock of children stuff what is initially an entirely shot-up airplane wreck on a soccer field with cotton. They then try to make the wreck fly like a kite by pulling on a cord they’ve attached to it. The airplane thus becomes, for one, a means of transport for the fantasy that frees it from its situation, and for another, a metaphor for the transitory power of art. (Genoveva Rueckert)
Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt
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