On the Run: The Flight and Fight of Nirvana
Review by G. Whitney Azoy
Nirvana (2024)
Featuring Sadaf Nori, written and directed by Mohsen Rabiei
140 minutes, Dari with English subtitles
Available on Prime Video
Refugee experience has tarnished human affairs since the origins of myth and history. It was mentioned in early Sumerian law codes. Cain’s punishment in Genesis 4:12 was to be made a “restless wanderer,” and much of Jewish collective life, beginning with Exodus, has taken one form or another of refugee diaspora. The fall of Rome in 476 C.E. led to mass dislocation and displacement all across Europe. Whole populations fled—or tried to flee—from Attila and Chinghiz Khan.
The modern tally of refugees goes from crisis to crisis: 13 million Syrians displaced, nearly 8 million Venezuelans now in exile, another 8 million Sudanese uprooted, 6 million Ukrainians fled from Putin’s 2022 invasion with nearly 4 million more internally displaced. Nearly 50,000 risked the 100-mile voyage by open boat, crammed to the gunwales, from North Africa to the Canary Islands in 2024. Nearly 10,000 are known to have drowned.
My direct experience with refugees has come in Afghanistan as an anthropologist, educator, and field researcher for the International Rescue Committee. What once seemed peaceful “in the blessed time of the king” began crumbling with the 1973 deposition of Zahir Shah and then fell into a maelstrom of violence and displacement with the Marxist coup of 1978. I remember visiting a refugee camp outside Mazar-i-Sharif in 1992 and happening across a scrawny, determined 16-year-old kid, himself a refugee from war-torn Kabul, who would rise to become an Afghan ambassador and the founder of Displaced International.
Only the most minute fraction of 8 million Afghan refugees have met with such success. For most, life has deteriorated into ragged, fearful, hungry poverty. And for Nirvana, the eponymous heroine of this 2024 film, things get worse still. She’s in her final year of medical school in Kabul when the Taliban come to power in 2021. The film begins with her father about to be beheaded outside her bedroom window. Nirvana, played superbly by Sadaf Nori, can only bury her face in a pillow and scream. Orphaned and banned from completing her studies, she must choose between inevitable forced marriage to a Talib and the risks of road travel toward her maternal uncle across the Iranian border in Isfahan. Dressed as a boy, she starts west.
The balance of this two-hour film illustrates, by way of Nirvana, the desperate, tattered, exhausted, and terrified quality of refugee life on the run. Unable to go back to a home which will have been expropriated, she must trust to luck and to people she barely knows or, more often, doesn’t know at all. Some are kind: her initial driver, a woman with a cell phone, and her uncle (but not his wife and daughter, whose malice drives Nirvana from their home). Some are materialistically indifferent (“You pay me now or I leave you here.”). One is utterly evil, a human trafficker who, in the film’s most harrowing sequence, rapes Nirvana, addicts her to heroin, and is about to kill her and harvest her kidneys when she stabs him with an air-filled hypodermic needle.
With Isfahan no longer a refuge, Nirvana manages to cross into Turkey and onwards to Istanbul, where she reconnects with her initial Kabul driver. He has failed repeatedly to cross further into Bulgaria and the E.U., but—with true refugee improvisation—has become a paid guide to the various backwoods routes. They try crossing again; her driver/guide is killed, and she returns catch-as-catch-can to Istanbul. With no ID card, no residence permit, no friends, and no money, Nirvana is left in the final scene alone on a bench, staring into the city night.
Not enough good can be said about Sadaf Nori’s performance in the title role or Mohsen Rabiei’s writing and direction. And while not enough has been said about the plight of displaced persons worldwide, this film makes a powerful statement.
Dr. G. Whitney Azoy is a cultural anthropologist and past Kabul director of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies.
