Subtitled "The Sun Behind the Moon," this film opens with shots of a total lunar eclipse — a dark circle in the midst of an almost unbearable brightness on an otherwise black screen. The next image: a dark burka lifting to reveal the shining face of a young woman. We understand. We didn't even need the subtitle. This film had us at "Kandahar," a name that went supernova after its North American premiere, outshining the filmmakers' fondest hopes for revealing the hidden beauty and suffering of the once-obscure nation of Afghanistan.

Let me illustrate, by means of a pair of screenings a week apart, the difference between Before and After: the first showing of Kandahar at the Toronto International Film Festival was September 8th, 2001. The second was September 15th. What a difference that particular week made! At Cannes, last spring, the film was dismissed as "baffling and ponderous". By the end of the year, Richard Corliss of TIME magazine had named it the Best Film of 2001.

Kandahar's director, Moshen Makhmalbaf, has many bitter detractors, and it would be no surprise if one credited Osama Bin Laden for the film's rise in fortunes. Putting it that way would be terribly unfair, but it seems fair enough to ask whether the tragically-timely release and subject matter tend to eclipse certain weaknesses in the film. Dialogue and action comes off by turns stiff and meandering. Most of the actors are obviously not professionals, but what they protray: Afghan peasants, beggars, Polish Red Cross nurses, village children. Makhmalbaf is considered (and derided by many as) the house filmmaker for the Islamic Republic; Iranian expatriates, especially, find it hard to see him as anything but a slick propagandist who gets carte blanche from a regime that persecutes and excludes real artists. If events had not raised the content of the film over the form, there might be more talk about a certain tendency toward preachiness and clumsy expository that Makhmalbaf hasn't really given in to since his early days as the official filmmaker for the revolutionary Islamic regime.

But while audiences may have been more ready for Kandahar than Makhmalbaf could have expected, further context will help Westerners appreciate even more this story which has come so tragically home to them — especially when that story is told with such astonishing style, substance, and audacity.

Americans were already very busy learning about burkas and madrassas and Afghan geography last fall when Kandahar was released, but most of us have some catching up to do when it comes to Iranian films. Movies which have found some limited success in this country, such as Children of Heaven and The White Balloon turn out to represent only the more accessible edge of a tremendous diversity of Iranian cinema, one which art house audiences have recognized for years as experiencing a Golden Age.

The most influential Iranian filmmaker, and the one most acclaimed by Western critics and cinema icons like Akira Kurasawa, is director Abbas Kiarostami, whose naturalistic style and blurring of documentary with fiction has created a form of "reality cinema" which some viewers reject as too much life and not enough art, yet others have found an incredible confrontation with both life and art. In 1990, Kiarostami shot some footage of the trial of a lonely, unemployed man named "Mr. Sabzian," who'd gotten himself in trouble for impersonating a famous Iranian director — Moshen Makhmalbaf. Kiarostami combined the trial footage with other documentary elements connected with the story and — in a wild twist of documentary re-enactment — got all the central participants, including Mr. Sabzian, to re-enact the encounters that ultimately led to the trial. Kiarostami also brought together Mr. Sabzian with the real Makhmalbaf to create an unforgettable climax for the film that became his masterpiece, Close Up.

Actually, finding the "real" Moshen Makhmalbaf is not so easy. Makhmalbaf is a different sort of filmmaker than Kiarostami, with a very different story. As a maker of films, for example, Makhmalbaf's approach has taken him in the opposite direction as his colleague, eschewing naturalism for sophisticated lighting and camera support, often preferring surrealism and symbolism to the plain linearity of Kiarostami. As a figure of history, Makhmalbaf would seem to be the True Believer who got his start making propaganda films for the regime but over time found an independent voice and point of view that his supporters insist qualify him now as an authentic artist. By the mid-1980s and especially in films like 1989's Marriage of the Blessed, Makhmalbaf had come to be known for films that combined his flair for arresting images with an incisive social conscience — even when the latter has taken him places the regime would rather he not go, such as in depicting shell-shocked Iraqi war veterans, or homelessness in Tehran.

In many ways, Kandahar represents an assimilation of the influence of Kiarostami by Makhmalbaf. The project proceeded in a way reminiscent of the making of Close Up. An Afghan woman named Pazira who'd fled her homeland with her family to Canada, where she'd become a journalist, contacted the director. She told him she had received a letter from a friend back in Kandahar who said she was contemplating suicide. Pazira urged the director to accompany her on her journey to save her friend. Makhmalbaf, ala Kiarostami, decided to make a film about a woman making her way through Taliban country to find her sister. Pazira, who had never been in front of a camera, agreed to play the character now called "Nafas". Shooting took place just over the Iranian border in Afghanistan under hurried and primitive — to say the least — conditions: Makhmalbaf had to grow his beard and pose as an Afghan, convince locals to participate as extras, and always keep an eye peeled for Taliban.

They literally made up the story as they went along.

But while the improvised and meandering style of the film recalls Kiarostami, this is definately a Makhmalbaf film. The director's visual flair serves him well even in the absence of studio conditions, for Makhmalbaf still manages to seize upon and present to us many more of his characteristic images. One of the most unforgettable images is the sight of dozens of Afghan men, single-amputees, victims of land mines, racing on crutches toward falling pairs of artificial legs, parachuted by the Red Cross. The ubiquitous presence of unexploded mines and their tragic consequence in the daily lives of Afghans is brought home again and again. A man searches for a new pair of legs for his wife, testing the size of the prosthetics against her shoes, as nonchalantly as those in the audience might look for shoes. A winsome con man — and, it should be noted, one should never trust a man missing a hand in a fundamentalist Islamic society — tries to obtain a set of false legs even though he still has good ones: he might need them, he tells the Red Cross workers.

Of course, by far the most photogenic objects in the film — ironically, since the central metaphor has them cast in the role of obscurer of beauty — turn out to be those multicolored burkas against the bone-white desert. The images of a hundred or so women (and who can tell if they're women? But that's the point, isn't it?) singing as they walk briskly across the alien landscape toward a wedding in Kandahar is as beautiful and "Other" as anything ever captured on film. Some scenes provide images less visual than dramatic: when a child must mediate between a village doctor and his female patient — hidden behind both burka and a hanging screen — we see perfectly embodied the cruel absurdity of Taliban culture. The doctor voices Makhmalbaf's earnest hope that one day all the women of Afghanistan, and thereby Afghanistan itself, will "come out from behind the curtain."

Now, when a film from one fundamentalist Muslim theocracy, constricted by censors to keep within a religious production code (women must wear head coverings, no physical contact between sexes unless the actors are actually marrried, etc.) accuses some other fundamentalist Muslim theocracy of oppressing females by making them wear head coverings... well, one has to wonder if the radical Islamic pot is calling the radical Islamic kettle black.

Another fair question. But those who are unfamiliar with the history of recent Iranian cinema, especially under the recent Iranian loosening of controls over cinema, will not know that an intense conversation about the role and rights of women under Islam has been going on now for some time. In some ways, you might say "social problem" films in Iran have comparable status and power to Hollwood films about American racism in the Fifties. Makhmalbaf has not been as aggressive or direct in aiming such questions in his films at his government as other Iranian directors, such as Deriush Merjui in his Leila or Jafer Panahi in last year's The Circle. But certainly this True Believer understands the implications of calling Afghan women "out from behind the curtain" when his entire career as a filmmaker has meant coming up with new ways to skirt the code in his own depiction of women onscreen. (And here Makhmalbaf adds one more to the list: by featuring non-Iranian actresses, his is able to briefly show women without the required head covering.)

Makhmalbaf may be still be a True Believer, but his best films feel less like the works of a regime lackey than those of a very careful critic who manages to raise the level of his criticism with each release. One of the strongest protections and encouragements for subversive artists under totalitarian regimes has been international success. After all the attention to Kandahar, everybody will be watching closely to see what Moshen Makhmalbaf does next.

Meanwhile, the problems have Afghanistan will not all be solved by the defeat of the Taliban. And when the Taliban is gone, everybody will be closely to see what America does next, and whether or not Afghanistan's coming out from behind the curtain was just a temporary historical phenomenon.

For the moment, Afghanistan is a key nation in America's foreign policy agenda. But the sufferings of Afghanistan have long been on the domestic agenda in neighboring Iran, which currently hosts more than a million and a half refugees and worries that further destabilitzation will bring more. One unbelievably messy Afghan civil war after another has made the waves of refugees, their trips home and back, their relatives joining them, their need to work, their need to feed and clothe and house their families an unavoidable part of life in Iran — and so also in Iranian cinema. In 1987, Moshen Makhmalbaf made Afghan refugees the central characters of his powerful film, The Cyclist, in which one desperate refugee agrees to an impossible bet in order to raise money for treatment for his sick wife. Several recent Iranian releases also touch on the subject: Djomeh, which won honors at a recent Cannes, is a sympathetic look at a lonely young Afghan whose longings for love cannot be fulfilled in the society in which he finds himself exiled. This year, the Iranian director whose films have found the most success in Western release, Majid Majdi, brought us the story of an enterprising young Afghan who brightens the dull life of Iranian laborers in the uplifting Baran.

With Kandahar, Moshen Makhmalbaf had already — even before history took a hand — gone out of his way to reach a wider audience: Most of the dialogue is in English, a first for an Iranian film. And much of that dialogue, as noted, is aimed directly at English-speaking viewers. And despite all the obstacles he sought to surmount, the director managed to get his message through loud and clear — assisted, tragically, by circumstances that make his film seem prophetic: but Kandahar is prophetic is in more senses than just foreseeing future events. It is prophetic in the sense which that word means also telling the truth, with power and with poetry.