Film Review: The Breadwinner

click to enlarge

Afghanistan in 2001 is the setting for The Breadwinner, Nora Twomey’s tough and imaginative animated story of a young girl trying to help her family. When her father is arrested—supposedly for teaching women how to read—and her mother is subsequently beaten for trying to find out what happened to him, Parvana (Saara Chaudry) decides to become the man of the house, as it were. She cuts her hair off and takes a boy’s name so she’s able to move through this increasingly Taliban-dominated world (it’s days before the war). While selling goods on the street and buying food for her mother and two siblings, Parvana is also trying to get to her father in prison.

The Breadwinner is told from the perspective of children but use caution: The violence is sudden and upsetting, and though the worst does occur offscreen, we’re talking beatings of women and machine-gun shootings. The animation is standard, richly coloured line drawings except for when Parvana copes by telling fables of wild animals and quests—these sections are dense and vivid, paper cutouts on layered backgrounds, providing cathartic levity in a very serious movie. The climax is almost unbearably tense, then incredibly lovely.