Against this background, a medical worker (Zubaida Sahar) is compelled to give up her job when her hospital is shut down and female doctors are arrested. Having lost her husband and brothers in the various wars, and responsible for a 12-year-old daughter (Marina Golbahari) and an elderly mother (Hamida Refah), her options for supporting the family seem to have run out. Then it occurs to her to cut off her daughter's hair, dress her as a boy, and send her out to work.

Named 'Osama', she is given a job by a sympathetic shopkeeper who had fought with her father. But soon she is forcibly enlisted into a Taliban school where boys receive a mixture of Koranic teaching and military training. There, Osama's struggle to conceal her real identity - aided by her only friend, young street urchin Espandi (Arif Herati) - is put to a greater test.

Right from the start, the cinematography is stunning. A vast crowd of women in sky blue burqas, demonstrating for the right to work, is violently dispersed by Taliban militia with gunfire and water cannon. The image of rivers of veils flowing down the streets, accompanied by the sound of mass screaming, hangs like a vivid nightmare over the rest of the film and beyond.

DID YOU KNOW?
	The entirely amateur cast was recruited from orphanages and refugee camps. Golbahari was discovered collecting cans in a Kabul street.   Despite the film's unequivocally anti-clerical position, Iranian government ministries donated substantially to its production and editing.

Handheld footage is inter-cut into early scenes and throughout the movie. Barmak maintains a photorealist style of camerawork but combines it with an extraordinary sense of composition. The smoky pastel timbres of walls and dusty streets are judiciously punctuated by bright colours: an over-spilling pumpkin cart; melons cradled in Osama's arms; the white turbans of the praying trainees.

Osama warrants serious attention either as a compelling drama or as an incisive illustration of a significant moment in Afghan history. It is both.