How Panj é asr (At Five in the Afternoon) Deconstructs Gender and Power in the Post-9/11 World

Samira Makhmalbaf's drama film Panj é asr (At Five in the Afternoon, Makhmalbaf, 2003) about a woman dreaming of becoming President in post-Taliban Afghanistan gets its title from Federico Garcia Lorca's poem 'A las cinco de la tarde' ('At Five in the Afternoon', Lorca, 1935), which the poet (Razi Mohebi) gives protagonist Nogreh (Agheleh Rezaie) to help her practice feeling confident with public speaking. Lorca's poem describes with haunting detail the scene of a bullfighter's gruesome death by a bull attack, painting a vivid picture of this death from the sound of flutes to the wounds' sun-like burning appearance. Each stanza constantly repeats the time the tragedy occurred as though it has traumatised the narrator. In an interview about Panj é asr, Makhmalbaf describes how she included the poem because she read it as a child thinking it was about the bull's death and thought it beautiful because it conveyed this death as so significant that global time stands still as if all the clocks in the world read five o'clock (Wood, 2004). In this interview, Makhmalbaf says there is beauty in depicting pain as human instead of ugly, describing this as forensically as Lorca did the bullfighter's death, with such examples as a person crying or the wrinkles on an elderly person's face.

The way Lorca puts a violent scene under a microscope to evoke the humanity of those living amidst that violence resonates with the way Makhmalbaf's film takes us to Kabul amidst the War in Afghanistan to show us all the Kabul citizens and Pakistani refugees so that we might see their humanity. The scene where Nogreh's father (Abdolgani Yousefrazi) interacts with a Pakistani refugee with different religious beliefs is crucial because arguing over whether loud music is blasphemous or pious establishes a human connection. Through this simple yet relatable exchange, the audience sees the same value in other creeds and cultures as Makhmalbaf does in Afghanistan and its citizens (Wood, 2004). Above all else, these refugees are innocent people who deserve the same empathy as Nogreh's family. The actual antagonistic force at play in the story - and, as the film argues, in real life - is the war devastating the country that makes refugees out of ordinary citizens.

One of the film's motifs is people not knowing (or being unable to say) why their country elected its leader, from the Pakistani refugees to the French soldier; many of the former do not seem to know (or care) whether their country's leader is a man or a woman. Many are too preoccupied with their family's struggle for survival or simply to find a home amidst poverty and war to think about such questions. Panj é asr problematises socio-political hierarchies that create, and whose perpetuity relies on, issues like diaspora, poverty, starvation and war; issues too immediate for the displaced, the poor, and the seriously ill or injured to be able to tackle widescale oppression.

The "war on terror's" underlying colonialist ideology was one of ostensibly more civilised, "superior" Western cultures bringing "freedom" and "peace" to ostensibly primitive, "savage," terrorist-dominated Islamic nations (Abbas, 2021, p. 403). But when butting heads with the patriarchal beliefs of her society while following her ambition to become the President of Afghanistan, the poet reminds Nogreh that a woman becoming the leader is an uphill battle even in places like Europe and the United States. To paraphrase Makhmalbaf in that same interview, the United States prides itself on its modernity, but how many women Presidents has it had? The confluence of all these elements indicates Makhmalbaf's goal to challenge the values pervading the post-9/11 world. People accept a socio-political status quo, and a fallacious and hypocritical set of hierarchical beliefs, without necessarily knowing why they think that way, often because the powerful institutions that instilled those beliefs are also brutalising and exploiting people, creating such urgent problems that they lack the opportunity to question that status quo.

When Nogreh gets her photos taken for her prospective campaign, the photographer and the poet suggest multiple poses; some with the burqa, some without it. The photographer proclaims that women are best suited to traditional child-rearing and domestic maintenance roles. Like Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, 1975), Riddles of the Sphinx (Mulvey and Wollen, 1977), or The Watermelon Woman (Dunye, 1996) before it, Panj é asr illuminates how women's subjugation in life is comorbid with women's objectification in the photographic/filmic image. In the film, a student at Nogreh's girls' school argues that a woman could never be President because she has children to raise and no one would accept an Afghan woman without children. Makhmalbaf talks about speaking at a girls' school whose students, before class, aspired to be doctors or teachers but not the President because they believed a man would be more capable. Less than thirty minutes later, the students said they wanted to be the President (Wood, 2004).

Juxtaposing the photographer and Nogreh's classmate's dialogue with the change in opinion among the students at the real-life girls' school visit that inspired it illuminates the need and possibility for citizens from various walks of life to unlearn sexist beliefs. These prejudices among individuals are symptomatic of systemic injustice; political and religious institutions impose these values onto regular citizens from the top down and normalise them. Even after the Taliban's defeat in 2001, many Afghan citizens like Nogreh's father upheld patriarchal and religiously fundamentalist beliefs, which is partially why Nogreh attends a girls' school and wears high-heeled shoes secretly. Similarly, Makhmalbaf struggled to find actors willing to show their faces on camera, and many of the women she approached would not do so without a burqa (Wood, 2004).

Panj é asr is contiguous with Makhmalbaf's goal of authentic and empathetic portrayals of Afghan citizens and those of refugees in the "Iran" segment of 11'09''01 - September 11 (Various, 2002) that she directed. Makhmalbaf discusses how important it is to portray "the reality of Afghanistan" on film, and for its citizens to be able to tell their own stories and have a voice. Before 9/11, the apex of Afghan representation she saw in American media was Rambo III (MacDonald, 1988), a Western saviour narrative of an American man rescuing people from the Taliban. After 9/11, Makhmalbaf observed negative representations of Afghanistan inundating the American media (Wood, 2004). This context further illustrates Panj é asr as a film aiming to challenge Western media's xenophobia by omission in its lack of authentic Afghan or Iranian representation just as it deconstructs the unspoken but palpable xenophobia of the "war on terror."

Scenes where Nogreh secretly expresses her femininity between narrow doorways and castle arch columns create frames within the frame that make Kabul's ancient architecture symbolic of patriarchy and religious fundamentalism as pigeonholing, restrictive power structures. Makhmalbaf used a similar technique in Sib (The Apple, Makhmalbaf, 1998) where a man (Ghorban Ali Naderi) locks his two daughters (Massoumeh and Zahra Naderi) inside the house and behind bars to protect them from the outside world; here, the physically restrictive bars are symbolic of the socio-politically restrictive patriarchy. Panj é asr extends this systemic critique to Afghanistan's wider cultural landscape while, as described above, identifying that Western gender politics are far from perfect.

Before the Mujahedeen Era, Afghan women gradually gained similar freedoms and rights to their Western contemporaries (Amnesty International, no date). But today, the ultra-conservative Christian fundamentalism that typifies the majority-Republican Supreme Court and Project 2025 threatens to roll back gender equality in the United States (Ali, 2024), the latter having threatened to restrict reproductive healthcare rights by overturning Roe v Wade in 2022 (BBC News, 2022). Former President Donald Trump appointed three Supreme Court Justices involved in this ruling (Supreme Court of the United States, no date). Many factors led to Trump becoming President, but a key thing to note here is a sentiment during the 2016 Presidential Election: "Is America ready for a woman President?" (Bryant, 2016). The doubt this cast over then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton will have helped Trump better attract conservative voters. The way Panj é asr challenges the jingoistic belief that the West is more advanced or civilised than the East has become even more incisive, and relevant following the Trump administration, the majority-Republican Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade, and Project 2025 promising to accelerate a Christian Right authoritarian agenda.

Nogreh and the poet preparing her campaign and discussing what she will do when she becomes President is humorous at times and hopeful at others. Although they joke about what role the poet should have in Nogreh's prospective government, his efforts to support Nogreh and her campaign convey that he earnestly believes in her future leadership, as per the subtext of him telling the French soldier when he asks about Nogreh that he is looking at the future President of Afghanistan. The significance of the brighter, more egalitarian future towards which Nogreh and the poet work becomes all the clearer when juxtaposing it with Nogreh's sister Leylomah (Marzieh Amiri) whose starving baby is a synecdoche for their current struggle for survival amidst poverty and war, and is symbolic of the future generations at stake in all these present-day conflicts.

The audience sees fully how urgent these problems are when, after the influx of Pakistani refugees overcrowding their shelters forces Nogreh's family to travel through the desert in search of a new place to live, Leylomah's baby starves to death. Additionally, Leylomah anticipates her missing husband Akhtar's return and the audience likewise hopes for this until, unbeknownst to Leylomah, Nogreh's father learns from a refugee that Akhtar is dead. Much like the girls' school, Leylomah's starving baby echoes Makhmalbaf's real-life experiences before making the film. Makhmalbaf met a family with a starving baby but unlike Leylomah's baby, the real-life baby she encountered survived (Wood, 2004). The film's ambiguous ending symbolises its ambivalent overall philosophy: Nogreh and Leylomah trek through the desert searching for new shelter; it is uncertain whether they will find it. Panj é asr establishes that gender equality, survival, and a brighter future are possible; this is hopeful, but not blindly optimistic. The film does not shy away from the fact that this hope is precarious in the face of diaspora, fundamentalist patriarchy, poverty, and war. As long as these control our lives, the freedom and safety we need will remain a pursuit, not a guarantee. However, that better future is worth striving for in no small part because human life from all generations and parts of the world is valuable.

WORKS CITED

Interview

Wood, J. (2004) 'Interview with Samira Makhmalbaf'. Interview with Samira Makhmalbaf. Interviewed by Jason Wood for Ion Productions.

Journal Article

Abbas, T. (2021) 'Reflection: the “war on terror”, Islamophobia and radicalisation twenty years on', Critical Studies on Terrorism, 14(4), pp. 402-404.

News Articles

Ali, S.S. (2024) 'How Project 2025 could affect women', NewsNation, 19 July. Available at: https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/2024-election/how-project-2025-could-affect-women/ (Accessed: 5 October 2024).

BBC News (2022) 'Roe v Wade: What is US Supreme Court ruling on abortion?', 24 June. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54513499 (Accessed: 5 October 2024).

Bryant, N. (2016) 'Hillary Clinton and the US election: What went wrong for her?', BBC News, 9 November. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-37922959 (Accessed: 5 October 2024).

Poem

Lorca, F. G. (1935) 'A las cinco de la tarde'/'At Five in the Afternoon', Yeyebook [Online]. Available at: https://www.yeyebook.com/en/f-garcia-lorca-poetry-at-five-in-the-afternoon-english-text/#:~:text=Cogida%20and%20death%2C%20also%20known%20by%20the%20title%3A,in%20the%20blood%20and%20dust%20of%20an%20arena. (Accessed: 5 October 2024).

Web Pages

Amnesty International (no date) Women in Afghanistan: The Back Story. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/womens-rights-afghanistan-history (Accessed: 5 October 2024).

Supreme Court of the United States (no date) Current Members. Available at: https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx (Accessed: 5 October 2024).

FILMOGRAPHY

Films

11'09''01 - September 11 (2002). Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu,Youssef Chahine, Amos Gitai, Shôhei Imamura, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Samira Makhmalbaf, Mira Nair, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Sean Penn, and Danis Tanovic [Film]. UK/France/Egypt/Japan/Mexico/USA/Iran: Artificial Eye.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Directed by Chantal Akerman [Film]. Belgium/France: Progrés Films.

Panj é asr/At Five in the Afternoon (2003). Directed by Samira Makhmalbaf [Film]. Iran/France: Bac Films.

Rambo III (1988). Directed by Peter MacDonald [Film]. USA: TriStar Pictures.

Riddles of the Sphinx (1977). Directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen [Film]. UK: British Film Institute (BFI).

Sib/The Apple (1998). Directed by Samira Makhmalbaf [Film]. Iran/France/Netherlands: MK2 Diffusion.

Watermelon Woman, The (1996). Directed by Cheryl Dunye [Film]. USA: First Run Features.