Marina Golbahari
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Marina Golbahari (born 1989) is a Tajik actress who was born in Kabul. She gained international fame with her role as the title character in the 2003 film Osama, playing a girl who had to dress and act as a boy to support her family during the Taliban years.
She was working on the streets of Kabul as a beggar, asking passers-by for money when she was casually discovered by famed Tajik director Siddiq Barmak, who cast her as Osama. The movie went on to earn a Golden Globe award as best foreign film, and Golbahari's job in it was well received by many critics, including The Arizona Republic's Richard Nilsen, who wrote, "there is no shortcoming in the acting of Marina Golbahari".
Golbahari bought her parents a home with the money she earned from Osama.
Actress in the award-winning 'Osama' gets attention at school, but her life is still modest
By Carlotta Gall The New York Times
Posted: March 12, 2004
KABUL, Afghanistan — Marina Golbahari, the star of the award-winning Afghan film "Osama," is the envy of her classmates. She flaunts a new silky outfit and high-heeled black boots and says three of her school friends want to be in the movies, too.
Yet her life has not changed dramatically since the Afghan film director Siddiq Barmak spotted her scavenging on the street one day about a year ago.
Despite the new clothes, Marina, 13, still looks much like the poor Kabuli child she was then. She is skinny, her hands rough, her face marked by sores. And though her family has moved into a two-room house bought with the help of Barmak and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an Iranian director who helped finance "Osama," Marina refuses requests to be interviewed at her home. She is embarrassed by its meager state and a little afraid of her father, who does not like visits from foreigners.
"We are living in very bad conditions, and when the rain and snow come, the roof leaks and drips everywhere," Marina said through an interpreter in an interview one afternoon at her school here. "When guests come, there is no room for them to stay overnight."
Though she and her seven siblings no longer beg on the streets, the family survives mostly on the $4 to $6 a day that her father earns from his street stall selling music cassettes. The children spend their mornings at a government school and their afternoons at a charitable school for poor neighborhood children, who get a daily meal and some basic classes there. Still, Marina, like Afghanistan itself, has come a long way.
When Barmak first asked her to sing for him, she thought he was going to offer her and her family some help, she recalled. But he wanted her to star in his film, the first feature made in Afghanistan since the fundamentalist Taliban movement, now ousted, took over Kabul in 1996, banning films, television and music.
The idea of movie acting shocked her at first. "No, I am not an infidel," she recalled telling Barmak.
The only films she had ever seen were Indian Bollywood productions, viewed at her aunt's house after the Taliban fell. Women in these movies are brazen by Afghan standards: dancing, baring their midriffs and even embracing men.
"I was thinking it would be like Indian films," she said of Barmak's "Osama," which recently won a Golden Globe award for best foreign-language film. "He laughed and said, 'No, it will not be like that.' "
"Osama" was to be about life under the Taliban, a subject Marina understood well. She plays a 12-year-old in Kabul whose father is dead and whose mother and grandmother are destitute and unable to feed the family. (Taliban restrictions forbade women to work or even to leave their homes without a male companion.)
With no man or boy around, her desperate mother cuts her daughter's hair, dresses her like a boy and sends her to work in a dairy shop.
"They cut my hair," Marina said. "It was difficult. How can a girl be made like a boy and go to work?" She added, "In the film I had to go to school with boys at a religious school, and then they find out that I am a girl, and they take me out and they punish me, and they put me down a well."
Marina went with her parents and two of her sisters to see "Osama" when it was first shown at the Kabul Cinema, one of the few working movie houses here. "I did not like it because it showed the times of the Taliban," she said.
"My mother, father and sisters went to see it," she added. "They liked my acting, but when they put me down the well, my father fainted. My mother was also upset when they put me down the well. My sisters were saying: 'Well done! Well done! How did you dare go down the well?' "
If the filming sometimes made Marina cry, it was also fun and empowering for a girl once accustomed to begging. Her fee, slight by American standards, was an above average salary for Afghanistan. "I earned $110 a month while I was filming, and then we bought the house," she said. Barmak and Makhmalbaf put up $10,000 to buy the two-room building. (Before, the family had rented a house.)
To ensure that Marina benefits from the property, Barmak said he had made a point of registering the house in her name, not her father's.
"We just need $2,000 more to fix the house up," Marina said in a grown-up voice. A French journalist had promised to help her with that, she said.
Today Marina is a lively teenager with a busy life, happy the Taliban times are over and a little star-struck.
She has made a second film, a short called "Kurbani," or "Sacrifice," a harrowing tale of an Afghan girl trying to save her sick mother.
"Have you ever interviewed any Indian movie stars?" she asked suddenly.
She is preparing to do another short film, but already her father is telling her to stop acting, she said. (Even with the increased freedom here, acting is often seen as immodest.)
And her dream of making it to Hollywood seems remote.
"I'd like to be a big star in America," Marina said, "but as long as I don't speak English and don't finish my education, how can I be?"
