Interview with the director of THE AMERICAN BEAUTY ACADEMY OF KABUL

THE AMERICAN BEAUTY ACADEMY OF KABUL
By Emily Christianson


Flipping through the newspaper, Liz Mermin found a story she couldn’t resist, a group of American women planning a beauty school in post-Taliban Kabul in Afghanistan. What seemed like an anomaly at first started to make sense when the independent director took her crew to the opening of the school in 2003. Mermin soon discovered that these Afghan women stood to own and operate their own salons, meaning greater financial support for their families and children.


Over a 10 week period Mermin filmed the 20 students and rotating volunteer instructors, some who were returning to Afghanistan after more than 20 years in the states. In April 2006 she released the feature length The American Beauty Academy of Kabul in theaters across the U.S.


“I sort of had my eye out for stories in that part of the world to show other sides of Afghanistan …,” Mermin says of learning about the school in 2002. “I feel like documentaries, these small personal stories, are the best way to create human connections and get people over that sort of over simplified view.”


Mermin recently talked with Film Radar about her work as a freelance filmmaker and what it was like filming in Afghanistan.


How did you get involved and why was it important to you?

I was finishing up an anniversary special for ABC called Report from Ground Zero about rescue workers and the World Trade Center attacks of 2001 and it had been a harrowing month of interviewing fire fighters and cops and their families and it brought up many things. One of the things it brought up was that a lot of the anger and grief was being channeled into this knee jerk anger at Afghanistan and this notion that Afghanistan was kind of being reduced in the popular consciousness to the place where Al Qaeda was and where Bin Laden was and we should go bomb the hell out them and they were the enemy. Clearly that felt like a dangerous concept to be floating around … When I heard the story about this beauty school it just sort of jumped out because it was just such a crazy idea and I immediately thought how could this not be an amazing film? Who are these people? They must be fascinating …


One of the things it said in the story was that during the Taliban women had been running beauty salons out of their houses in secret even though they could have been locked up, beaten, or killed for doing so. I thought well there is obviously something more going on here then just a group of Americans saying “Hey, I know let’s teach them how to do hair.” Obviously this was something important to women in Afghanistan, much more important then I could understand.


Did any Afghan students decline to participate?


I said if anyone doesn’t want to be on camera, this is what this is. It’s going to be on camera internationally around the world and we will keep you off camera if you want to be off camera and no one said a thing, which surprised me. When it came to going home with the women that was harder … some of them said, ‘oh I would do it but my husband won’t let me or my father won’t let me’ and many of them said you can come and film in my house but keep your cameras in the bags and don’t let anyone see you. Come in quickly, we don’t want the neighbors talking. We don’t want word getting out …


Are there plans to release the film in Afghanistan?


Afghan TV is still pretty heavily censored and it was not on BBC World … We will not license it to be shown in that part of the world.


What techniques did you use to make the students more comfortable in front of the camera?


I think that with every documentary I’ve ever done, the first week or two is basically, other than essential plot points, going to be useless. Other than just getting the thing started you’re not going to get people acting natural or opening up to you until they’ve had a chance to sit down and ask you all the questions you are going to ask them. They want to find out whether you are married who you live with, do you have kids, do you have a boyfriend, brothers, sisters, they just sort of grilled us and so once they’ve asked me all those questions it’s easier for me to ask them and you know sort of making a human connection.


How is the school doing?


The school is no longer running … it’s a common thing with aid organizations. There is this rush of support at the beginning and then attention moves on … the school was on hold waiting to start the next class and Debbie, the hair dresser from Michigan who drives around, she actually stayed there … She got a house, she stayed there, married an Afghan man, and started a beauty salon and started teaching classes there. She is now running kind of a beauty school of her own which is sort of a continuation of the school, which is not officially endorsed as the same thing …


Was this your first time dealing with a language barrier on a project?


Yes it was … My producer Nigel Noble had a brilliant idea from a film he had done in Brazil … The audio would come in from the mics and go to the mixer and then it would be sent out to an earpiece [our translator] was wearing. She was also wearing a radio mic so she would be in another room or off in the corner somewhere out of earshot of the sound woman and she would very quietly give me a simultaneous translation into this mic. I was wearing a receiver with headphones so I was hearing from her a running translation of what was going on, which seemed really complicated as I said, but what it meant, was that I could respond in real time.



What was it like editing content in another language?


It was insane. At that point I had picked up enough of the language and had enough of an idea of what was going on because I remembered it. I would basically sit there with a time code translation in one hand and a Farsi dictionary, because I really cut my dialogue. I cut phrases and really put things together and so in another language where you’re not quite sure where phrases begin and end it can really slow things down, but it was definitely fascinating in an anal kind of way.


What did you do in your free time?


It was the weirdest place in that respect because it’s just a bunch of journalists and aid workers and all these strange people who would do something as crazy as go off to Afghanistan. There were restaurants, but very few … within a week of being there you couldn’t go out without seeing people you knew. People make friends in those circumstances very quickly. I made friends with a reporter from the L.A. Weekly and a radio guy from Paris and just random people coming through and you end up having dinner with them three nights a week …


Did you grow accustomed to all the men walking around with guns?


You just get used to it. I live in Chelsea in Manhattan and there is a big sports facility on the West side Highway and they have a driving range and when I first got back I was running along [the river] and I saw someone with golf clubs slung over their shoulder and I thought it was a machine gun and I just thought “oh there’s a guy with a machine gun.” I thought wait a minute I’m in New York, this isn’t happening. It happened over and over again when I saw someone carrying them that way I thought there’s their kalishnakof. It’s amazing what you get used to.


Did you feel safe?


I did. I was scared going over there. That, “oh my God what have I gotten myself into?” …


What do you hope Americans will take away from the film?


Initially it was just to show a side of Afghanistan that people hadn’t seen. Since I started working on it people have seen Osama, there has been more written about Afghanistan, people have a broader sense of that world. I think there are two things. To create some kind of emotional connection, to see these cute girls laughing about marriage and love and all of these things and when you see the back pages of the newspaper, which is where Afghanistan is these days and you read about a bombing going on there you have an image, a feel of real people who are involved in this and who are affected by it … it’s not just a body count.


What are you working on right now?


It’s another BBC project, I love BBC. It’s a documentary called Office Tigers and I spent three months in Madras, India shooting at a company called Office Tiger. It’s an American owned business process outsourcing company. They do back office work for major investment banks, legal firms and publishing companies. Basically the story is partly about this new generation of urban professionals in India, people in their 20s with a lot of money suddenly, working in the corporate world with all these new job opportunities opening up and what their lifestyles are like … but it is also about … American corporate culture. It’s similar to Beauty Academy in that its Americans coming in and saying this is what it means to be a professional, this is how you behave in a business …


Is there always a theme to the work that you do and the kind of projects you pursue?


Basically I look for ways to get at issues that might be topical, kind of going into a topical issue sideways … There always has to be some sort of sense of discovery, some kind of question that I don’t understand to make something interesting to me and it has to take people into a world that they haven’t seen before and create an experience …


What are your feelings on the mainstream documentaries popular today?


I think because … and this is like a documentary gripes … because of films like Michael Moore’s and because of a lot of the very overtly political films out there, which you know politically I think are great … and I’m really glad that people are being given information and told to think about things differently. I do feel like people are getting away from these films that are open ended and don’t tell you what to think … they don’t always have to have an explicit message that everyone can walk away saying this film told me to think this and everyone goes out and agrees on what the film was about and what it was trying to say – so you can watch them for the same reason you would watch narrative film, to be somewhere else and see other things and think about a story. That’s my little plea for documentaries.



Liz Mermin is a New York-based independent director, producer, and editor specializing in social-issue documentaries.  Her feature length documentaries include The American Beauty Academy of Kabul and On Hostile Ground, the story of three US abortion providers at the end of a decade of unprecedented anti-abortion violence.
As a freelance filmmaker, Mermin’s television credits include American Talent for PBS (director/editor), Report from Ground Zero for ABC (producer/editor) and Parking Lot for Trio (director/editor). She has also made documentary shows for Discovery, Court TV, Oxygen and various nonprofits. She graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a degree in literature and has a Masters degree in cultural anthropology from New York University. She also has a Certificate in Culture and Media from NYU.

Read more about this film at the official website.

4 Comments:

1. Hi,
   Glad to stumble your article. In the summer of 2004, a group of volunteer American hairstylists, financed by the beauty industry, arrived in Afghanistan to open a school. In “The Beauty Academy of Kabul,” the director Liz Mermin documents the hilarious, moving and sometimes fractious meeting of diametrically different cultures, one that has suffered unimaginable horrors and one that believes a good perm is the answer to everything.

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