Movies about war are a dime a dozen, but how do you film peace? In “Angels Are Made of Light,” director James Longley trains his camera on a school in Kabul, Afghanistan, where young children and weary adults attempt to imagine something resembling a hopeful future. Though much of the country is still troubled by conflict, the capital appears to be slowly working toward a sense of stability. And while the specter of war looms over Longley’s documentary, its shadow is subtle. The director is more interested in showing ordinary people trying to live some semblance of a normal life.
The film was shot over three years, and when it begins, the Daqiqi Balkhi School that is the subject occupies a cluster of tents in the courtyard of a devastated mosque; it will later move to its own building. The neighborhood school serves as a structuring presence, but it’s a loose one, as the picture detours into the lives of students and administrators. We meet three brothers — Rostam, Sohrab and Yaldash — whose mother teaches at the school and whose father insists that they decide between going to work and getting an education. The children seem wise beyond their years, haunted by the horrors of the past and the desperation of the present. “I worry about what will become of us in the end,” one says. “This thought consumes me.” However, they’re also gleefully ambitious and competitive, eager to place first in their classes. They understand that education can mean a better life, but that survival may need to come first.
The grown-ups around them have their own concerns. The school’s determined principal, Faiz Mohammed, questions religious dogma even as he continues to teach it, though always with an emphasis on the power of rational discourse. The adults in the film — among them an artistically inclined teacher of Dari as well as the school’s cleaning woman — relate the sad history of Afghanistan in impressionistic interludes that Longley illustrates with archival footage. These simple recollections lack detail, but they capture the hesitant quality of this moment. The return of war never feels far from anyone’s mind, and this sense heightens the importance of this fragile peace.
Longley likes to shift perspective, and the film often basks in a collective, many-voiced consciousness. We can’t always tell who’s talking, and our focus may drift among individuals and stories. In the hands of a lesser director, such a gambit could easily lead to tedium and confusion, but Longley — whose Oscar-nominated 2006 effort “Iraq in Fragments” portrayed the United States’ occupation through the eyes of individuals in parts of Iraq — has a knack for composition and for capturing telling details. Long shots of Kabul reveal the ragged majesty of the city; footage of streets, shops and doorways absorbs us in the hustle and bustle of neighborhood life; attentive close-ups convey people’s complicated thoughts. The director finds beauty everywhere — in a cloud of dust, a traffic jam, the raucous din of children at play. And wherever such beauty exists, we imagine, hope can never be entirely absent.
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‘Angels Are Made of Light’
Not rated. In Dari, Pashto and Arabic, with English subtitles.
Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.