Movie Review: Frontrunner

Frontrunner is a documentary covering Dr. Massouda Jalal's run for president in the 2004 Afghanistan elections. She was the only woman candidate running against Hamid Karzai and 16 other men. She had come in second to Karzai in the 2002 emergency elections.

The filmmakers had access to her campaign staff and showed the difficulties of a woman in post-Taliban Afghanistan. A lot of people believed that it is against Islamic law for a woman to be the head of government (ruling over men). Jalal counters this well saying that there have been woman rulers in Indonesia, Pakistan and Turkey, all Islamic nations. Still a man interviewed asks "if a man fails as president what hope does a woman have?" Also captured on camera is the police tearing down her posters but not the posters of other candidates.

This film actually made me happy about the level of debate in US politics. The illiteracy rates in Afghanistan are 80% among men and 90% among women. One result of this is that the ballots are a lot nice than in the US. They are in full color and have the pictures of the candidates on them. Why can't we have that? It also made me question all the flyers she handed out that had her biography printed on it. But really what else is there to do? She said she had a hard time getting TV coverage.

We didn't learn a lot about Jalal but she did emphasize that she wasn't running on a platform specifically of women's rights but rather with a goal of helping all of Afghanistan. That probably made a lot of sense but it also undermined a film about the first female candidate. I got the sense that this film started out as a good idea, and they went and filmed as much as they could, but then had a hard time finding a good narrative thread for the film

Certainly the scenes of people voting for the first time were moving, but it's also something we'd seen before. The end is taken up with problems in the election where the famous purple ink was rubbing off and this allowed people to vote multiple times, though it's not clear how common this was or how many actually voted again. The most telling bit was that all officials looked to the Ambassador of the US to help resolve the situation instead of the temporary Afghani government or the UN.

So the film lacked a strong narrative, didn't describe the main character in any depth, wasn't particularly entertaining and didn't tell me much new; yes it was my least favorite documentary of the festival.