Taliban days.(Now Playing)

Some movies exist to bear witness--to document an event or way of life that otherwise might be overlooked. Since the United States toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan, plenty of news reports have shed light on what the Afghan people suffered under the regime's rule. Yet no journalism can match the poetic power of Osama, the first feature film to be made in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. It's the difference between second-hand news and first-person experience.

Written and directed by Siddiq Barmak, an Afghan filmmaker who fled the country when the Taliban took over, Osama follows a widow and her teenage daughter as they struggle to survive in Taliban-run Kabul. Since she has no male escorts to accompany her in public, the woman is forced to scurry in the shadows. Desperate to earn enough to eat, she convinces her daughter to pretend to be a boy so she can get work. And so the girl becomes Osama.

Barmak has cited mainly Asian filmmakers as influences--the Russian great Andrei Tarkovsky and Iranian contemporaries Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami among them--but Osama also clearly owes much to the neorealist tradition of post-World War II Italy. Like the films of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, Barmak's picture shuns artifice and rubs your nose in reality. The locations have a dusty verisimilitude; the nonprofessional actors have faces lined with true experience. Indeed, Marina Golbarhari, the girl who plays Osama, was found by Barmak on the street.

This isn't to say that Osama has the dryness often associated with documentaries. Barmak exhibits a keen eye for the lyrical, loaded image, as when a crowd of women in their blue burkas march down a Kabul street demanding the right to work. They're scattered by water hoses, a brutal scene Osama and her mother watch from a doorway. Later, as Osama's grandmother cuts off the girl's hair, she tells her the story of a boy who walked under a rainbow and ...