By Bari Pearlman

With her 2001 debut On Hostile Ground, documentary filmmaker Liz Mermin followed three American doctors through the tricky battle zone that is a woman’s right to choose. In her latest film, The Beauty Academy of Kabul, she follows eight American hairdressers through a literal battle zone to explore...a woman’s right to coiff. In the summer and fall of 2003 she traveled to the recently embattled Kabul for the opening of a beauty academy. Three months and 170 hours of footage later, she surprised even herself with a nuanced story not only about international aid in the form of Frederic Fekkai scissors but about the question of beauty as an act of feminism. Does she or doesn’t she believe that’s possible? Fellow documentary filmmaker Bari Pearlman tries to find out, but only her hairdresser knows for sure.

The Beauty Academy of Kabul opens Fri., March 24, at the Angelika Film Center in New York and on April 28 at the NuArt Theatre in Los Angeles. For additional cities, visit www.beautyacademyofkabul.com

Filmmaker: How did you get involved with this film?

Liz Mermin: I read a little story about Beauty Without Borders and the opening of the beauty school in the New York Times. I did some research and found Patricia O’Connor, one of the hairdressers developing the project, who was based in New York. So I went over in the spring of 2002 with Patricia and Debbie Turner, another hairdresser, for a week, on my own as a scout shoot. It was their first trip over there to see how the construction was going. And they had this shipping container of donated products that they had to meet and unload. So how did I get access to the story? I helped them carry boxes for two days. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Coming from the States, where the question of beauty and femininity and feminism is such a contested one, what particularly interested you in the story of a beauty school?

Mermin: I love making films that make a political statement that you believe in, and I always make films about people who I like and identify with and support. But it’s sort of more interesting as a filmmaker sometimes when you don’t know what you think about the subject. And I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about the people in this film, and I did worry whether I was going to be making fun of them. But over the course of being there and watching what was happening, I developed much more respect for the project than I had when I was first pitching it.

Filmmaker: Where did that respect grow from?

Mermin: Initially, I liked the tension of whether the hairdressers were just taking this cultural, oppressive concept of beauty in the West and making the women of Afghanistan really worried about what they look like, versus whether I was teaching them a marketable skill, business skills, through free expression. And then of course, once I started learning about the project and learning about Afghanistan, I realized that the idea that the Westerners were “bringing” any concept of beauty to them was absurd. That was my own ignorance about Afghan history, because in fact beauty has been incredibly important to women in that culture for a very long time, and they have a very strong sense of what beauty means that was not influenced necessarily by the American concept of beauty.

Filmmaker: For the women who attend the school and in some cases have their own salons, is it safe to assume they are from a higher economic class?

Mermin: There was a range. The thing is, being a hairdresser is really looked down upon in that society. It’s not something that a well-brought-up woman does. That changed when the Taliban came in, because a lot of women who were pulled from public jobs and schools started doing it in secret because it was one of the only things they could do from home. And their husbands had lost their jobs, so someone needed to earn money. So suddenly it was acceptable. Like Hanifa, her father was a doctor, and she probably wouldn’t have been a hairdresser if the Taliban hadn’t come in and disrupted everything. Also, you don’t have to be educated or literate to do it, which many of the women aren’t.

Filmmaker: There was such a clear sense of community among the students both at school and with their clients in their home salons.

Mermin: That was actually another reason that I was drawn to the story, which was the question of what do they talk about in a beauty salon in Afghanistan? Presumably they talk about more than just “Oh, the Taliban were awful and we were miserable,” which is all that we in the West really knew about, especially when I started in 2003. You don’t know what they talk about amongst themselves when they’re just hanging out being normal people. And that’s part of why the beauty salon is something they like, because then people from the neighborhood come in, and they can gossip and they can talk. I liked that kind of sideways angle on the culture.

Filmmaker: Were you disappointed to find out how mundane the conversation was?

Mermin: [laughs] Well, that’s the problem of course. You’re all excited about how it’s all about daily life and normal stuff. And then you’re like, Oh my god, this is so boring! [laughs] My big crisis with this film — and it happens with everything that I’ve done — is that you get there and you’re like, Nothing’s actually happening. You want these story arcs, right? That’s the code word in documentary. And unless you’re following something for like a year, it’s very rare to get a real story arc. So then what I end up looking for is these emotional key moments where you can connect with somebody because something they say resonates with you, or something in their expression or the way that they’re presenting themselves makes you able to identify with them in a way that you otherwise wouldn’t.

Filmmaker: Was there a turning point in terms of the students’ openness with you? I’m thinking of the picnic scene and how candid they were about their relationships with their husbands.

Mermin: Oh yeah, we had been there a month at that point. And I would say — and I think this is true for every film I’ve done — that the first week or two is almost always useless. You get plot points because things happen, but nobody trusts you enough to tell you anything personal. But we were all women, and we became kind of identified in their minds as part of the school because we were there all the time. So they’d come up and they’d start asking us questions and we’d tell them about our lives. So by the time we shot the picnic scene they knew that none of us were married, they knew who had a boyfriend and who didn’t, they knew about our parents and brothers and sisters. They had interrogated us about our lives in very much the same way we ultimately did theirs.

Filmmaker: Do you think any of them would now regret their outspokenness?

Mermin: What they kept saying was, “As long as this isn’t going to be shown on Afghan television, we’re okay with it. We don’t want our families to see it.” And there were a few scenes that after the fact they said, “Please don’t use this,” which I didn’t.

Filmmaker: What about the young girl who reveals that she has a secret boyfriend?

Mermin: That’s the one that I’m most concerned about, but she seemed okay with it. I worry that in trying to stay away from the stereotypes that Afghan women are in danger, I might have underestimated a little bit too much, I might have been a little cavalier with the risk they were taking in opening up to us.

Filmmaker: How did the teachers’ visit to the students’ home salon come about?

Mermin: The crew had visited enough salons that I had seen the huge gap between what the students were being taught and the realities of how they were working. I mean, they were being taught to blow-dry hair and to shampoo and all of these techniques that were dependent on running water and electricity, which most of the salons didn’t have. And I felt like for Sheila in particular, who was a real hardass — bringing her to a home salon and having her see the circumstances in which they were working would help her learn something too.

Filmmaker: How did you handle the language barrier?

Mermin: The translation setup was my producer Nigel Noble’s idea, and it was incredibly complicated. We had two radio mikes we were using without subjects, three sometimes because we had four channels of audio. And our translator was getting a signal from the mixer to an earpiece that she was wearing, and then she was wearing a radio mike and was doing a simultaneous translation, which was sent to a receiver that I was wearing. In the interviews it was a total lifesaver because I could react in real time; I didn’t have to sit there looking like an idiot smiling and nodding while they’re saying something I don’t understand. I could actually respond appropriately and ask another question fairly quickly. And I think that made the interviews much more present and real. And Anna Rieke, who did the sound, did an incredible job with all these crazy setups. And there were so few women translators whose English was good enough, but we found this fantastic woman, Gitee Pirzada, who is 19 and wants to be a fashion designer and loved the beauty school. And I think the fact that she was young and befriended the students at the school helped our relationship with them as well.

Filmmaker: What were some of the other challenges of shooting in that environment?

Mermin: There was the dust in the camera, which was always worrisome. My d.p., Lynda Hall, was constantly cleaning. Then we had radio mike interference because there were so many military planes and trucks and weird signals in the air. The school was on the government grid, so we could always charge batteries when we were at the school, but the power was going out all the time at out guest house so that was a little scary. And then there was the difficulty that we were always wearing head scarves every time we went outside, which we never really learned how to put on properly. But really, people were very accommodating and kind and helpful with us and I think sort of protective of the fact that we were all women. And we had a big camera and a big tripod and we were small women, and I think that made people sort of curious and sympathetic.

Filmmaker: You edited the piece as well. What kind of challenges did you have in being the one who had to pull it together afterwards?

Mermin: A lot of people say that directors shouldn’t edit their own work because they fall in love with the material, and I kind of have the opposite problem, which is I’m so bored by it that I just want to kill myself. [laughs] But editing is how I think through a story. Unless I’m actually playing with the material and feeling what works and what doesn’t, I have a hard time. That’s something I’m trying to work through, because I’d love to hand off a little of the process. [laughs] So Nigel left me alone to freak out in the edit room, and then I would bring him in and read his reactions. The other thing that I found really important in the process is that I had a really smart assistant editor, Kelly Brant. While she was digitizing everything she took logging notes, and she would asterisk the things that she thought were interesting or funny or moving, and then I would come in and use those as places to start building scenes. And then I had another assistant editor, Rob Lueking, and an associate editor, Irvin Coffee, who would shape some scenes for me at night, like the water fight scene.

Filmmaker: Does the school exist now?

Mermin: The school as such does not exist, but what does is something that’s an offshoot of the school. Basically what happened was, the school was a product of tremendous good intentions and not a lot of experience, and so, moving forward, it just sort of imploded, which was a shame. But what happened was, Debbie stayed there and married an Afghan man as a second wife. So she’s still over there and she is running a kind of training salon. They got money from Clairol and Vogue and they’re still being run by donations, so in some senses it’s a continuation of the school. But it’s also a salon that’s supporting itself through giving haircuts to Westerners who are over there. And some of the students from that first class have been working with her.

Filmmaker: Towards the end of the film Patricia says, “This is paradise in the middle of hell.” You don’t do a lot of dwelling on that hell in the film. Why did you decide to stay away from directly contextualizing the beauty school?

Mermin: I think, to some extent, every time I would see Afghanistan represented, it was always weeping and horror. So you go there thinking that you’re going to get one kind of story and then when you stop and listen to people and you kind of have to be open to, well, what do they want to talk about, what do they want this story to be about? So I didn’t expect the film to be so much about love and marriage, but that’s what everyone wanted to talk about. I believe in point-of-view stories. And I didn’t want to go out and interview ex-Taliban and find out what they thought of the beauty school. I wanted it to be about the experience of the women in the school. And then the more horrifying parts of Afghanistan are represented visually. You see the masses of burkas and the guys with guns and a woman on the street holding the baby in the dust. You know, you look around and you can see that this is a city that’s been through hell. I don’t think you need someone telling you that over and over.

Filmmaker: What has been the audience’s response to this new point of view?

Mermin: The criticisms I get the most come from viewers who identify my point of view as a filmmaker with the point of view of the people opening the school, and see it as an uncritical endorsement of the school and an uncritical celebration of the American presence in Afghanistan. And they say, How can you do something that doesn’t talk about the fact that the Americans invaded? How can you do something that doesn’t talk about the damage the Americans did during the war? Then again, I’ve had critics who say, How come you never mention that the Americans liberated Afghanistan and that’s why the school is possible? So I’ve kind of gotten it from both sides. Some people think that it’s completely absurd and it’s a comedy. Some people think that it’s really moving and inspiring. Which I think is good, because I definitely set out to make a film that keeps you off balance in terms of what you think, because I keep changing my mind about it too.