Features

An Afghan shepherd stands in the countryside strumming a homemade guitar, an instrument he’s cobbled together out of a rusted oil can and some wire. The tune he plays is simple but full. 

“He’s representative of how people live there. You get whatever you can and make what you can of it,” said Cliff Orloff, who, with his wife Olga Shalygin, filmed the man as part of their documentary Afghanistan: A Fragile Peace. 

The Berkeley couple’s 30-minute documentary focuses on the country’s challenges as it gears up for presidential elections Oct. 9. It is scheduled to air on KQED Channel 9 on Sunday, Sept. 26, at 2 p.m. 

Two years after the fall of the Taliban, warlords continue to control most of the nation, the economy is propped up on opium cultivation and foreign aid, and a disarmament program has failed, the filmmakers say. 

But these realities, they note, are juxtaposed with Afghans’ hope that their country will soon know peace and democracy. 

Shalygin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, and Orloff, a former business and engineering professor at Cornell, Princeton and UC Berkeley, hope their film will help bring Americans’ attention back to Afghanistan. 

“I think that most people think there’s war in Iraq, and Afghanistan is over—it gets so little press,” said Orloff. “In fact that’s not true. It could blow up at any minute.” 

The piece is a follow-up to the couple’s 2002 PBS documentary Afghanistan, Winning the War, Losing the Peace. The couple returned to the country in April to shoot the new film over three weeks.  

“We found that things are booming,” said Orloff. “The stores were filled—two years ago they had nothing. But when you dug beneath the surface, you saw that opium represents half the country’s economy.” 

The warlords were quiet, and things seemed peaceful, he said. But that was largely due to the fact that they had huge poppy businesses to protect. 

“It’s not nearly as rosy as people think,” Orloff said. 

In the rural areas, where 80 percent of the population live, not much has changed in terms of infrastructure, said Shalygin. Most villages don’t have water, schools or medical clinics. And people are still threatened by roaming gunmen. 

The couple interviewed everyone from shepherds to a warlord to a university professor. They spoke to Afghan women, too, who said their equal rights, while protected under the country’s new constitution, still aren’t guaranteed. 

“Unfortunately, just because we create a constitution doesn’t mean it’s immediately in practice,” Shalygin said. “I was still blown away that even two years after the collapse of the Taliban women are still wearing the burkas.” 

The filmmakers aren’t new to Afghanistan. Shalygin became familiar with the region as a photographer for the Associated Press. She was part of the AP’s Moscow photography team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for its coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Orloff first traveled to Afghanistan in 1971, and says he was impressed by the Afghan people’s generosity and hospitality. 

The husband and wife team financed the project themselves, with Orloff writing the script and narrating and Shalygin filming. 

Since 1997, when they met through an Internet dating site, they’ve also produced documentaries on Cuba, the Yanomami Indians of South America, and the lives of women in Uzbekistan. 

Although the presidential election in Afghanistan promises to capture U.S. headlines, the filmmakers believe it is unlikely to bring legitimacy to whoever holds the office. Instead, power will remain with who has the gun, they said. 

“There’s a big push by the U.S. to make it happen,” Shalygin said. 

“So Bush can say, ‘See, we brought democracy there,’” Orloff added. 

But they believe that developing Afghanistan—bringing security to the people, setting up basic infrastructure like electricity and water, and educating the 80 percent of the population that is illiterate—would be a 20-year commitment. 

From the filmmakers’ perspective, the U.S.’s mission there is far from over. 

“It’s not an easy fix,” said Shalygin. 

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