Osama was bottled up inside me, says Barmak

‘‘The story was bottled up inside me. I had to take it out,’’ says Barmak. Based on a true story of a teenaged girl who was dressed up as a boy by her family, Osama is a metaphor for the hardships women in Afghanistan faced under the Taliban. ‘‘I was in exile in Pakistan when I read a letter in a newspaper. It described how a girl was dressed as a boy because the Amar-bin-Maroof, the Taliban’s cultural cops, wouldn’t allow her to step out,’’ he explains. ‘‘It touched me.’’

Then began his search for the perfect face. Once the Americans ‘‘liberated’’ Afghanistan in 2002, Barmak returned to his home in Kabul, looking for the main actor. ‘‘I must have met over 3,000 girls in orphanages, schools and refugee camps. No one matched my needs,’’ he reminisces. ‘‘Then one day on the streets of Kabul, I met Marina Gulbahari, then a 12-year-old beggar girl. Her big eyes expressed her deep despair. My search ended there.’’

When Barmak offered Gulbahari a role, she asked innocently: ‘‘What’s cinema? Will it change my life?’’

Osama certainly has changed the life of Gulbahari who begged because her father was jailed and there was no one else to feed her and her younger brother. ‘‘She loves Shah Rukh Khan and wants to visit India. I could have brought her with me but I was in Switzerland and came directly from there,’’ says Barmak who bought Gulbahari a house in Kabul after Osama won an award at the Pusan Film Festival last year. ‘‘Now she attends a school and has acted in a few more films. She has opened a new chapter.’’

Having grown up on films like Mera Gaon Mera Desh, the director of short films like Deewar, Daira, Begana has his favourites: Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra and Govinda. And before he flies off to Kabul, he has other things to do besides watching movies. ‘‘I have to buy clothes for my children (two daughters, one son). My daughters love Punjabi suits.’’