What goes around comes around, not so much in today’s televised survival trials as in a return to 1950s quiz shows and talent competitions now decided by SMS instead of audience applause meter. Afghan Star explores the fun, anticipation and -- no pun -- dead seriousness of this global phenomenon in a most unlikely place, the provincial cities and capital of that nation not yet out of the darkness of civil war, invasions and political, religious and social strife and intolerant oppression.

Winner of Sundance documentary Directing and Audience Awards and New York-premièring as Centerpiece of the Lincoln Center 20th International Human Rights Film Festival, this first theatrical feature from TV producer and journalist Havana Marking brings smiles, nods of approval and shivers of dread. It records three months, from regional auditions to final showdown, mixing in all along the political election-parallel campaigning by followers of one contestant or another, the faces and comments of families, fans, television workers and religious spokesmen, with the consequences and responsibilities of new equality, freedom and fame balanced against disgrace or even possible assassination.

Without narrator or obtrusive prompting questions though relying on an excess of printed titles, the eighty-seven minutes draws a movie audience in to accompany millions of Afghanis seated in front of television sets. If, like the sensation Afghan Pop Idol, it gets a tad drawn out near the end, this only mirrors that latter program’s foreign progenitor models.

Hopefuls are weeded out at local levels, and, following our same cruel pattern of elimination in front of the small-screen camera, the pop culture broadcasts continue from Kabul, on towards the luxury International Hotel final. But with the difference that this country has only just emerged from ruthless killjoy Taliban rule and contains a large percentage of hard-line Muslims, old and young, who frown on what the program represents in music, foreign styles, and gender equality. Before its three decades’ agony, Afghanistan had been surprisingly open to outside influences, as borne out by images of smiling students and mixed rock groups straight out of the Beatles era.

There are the controversial issues of modern youth music to start with and of women taking part with faces and hair uncovered and snapping fingers to dance while performing in makeup. As if conservatives’ objections were not enough, the country is further divided into distinct regional, ethnic, tribal and linguistic groups. Secularists and religious moderates line up behind, and proselytize for, their home area’s favorite son or daughter contestant even while Tolo TV and its starstruck aspirants would combat divisiveness with “music is our unity.”

Aged nineteen to twenty-five, the four finalists come from different places, ethnicities and backgrounds in music. Three of an original two thousand entrants were female, two of them among the quartet remaining in the running. Not alike in personality or performance, these two are obvious targets for reactionary forces, including the still-operative Taliban, despite an “I want to say the Taliban is finished.”

Broadcasting stations and cellphones are condemned and threatened by such male-dominated conservatism, but the country is shown as irrevocably caught up in the contest and the controversy. Done rationally or not, this text-message voting is the first step towards participation in an equality-for-all process of democratic expression.

Whether such elections on a popular culture level augur well for the country’s future, remains to be seen. Fascinating, Afghan Star pictures the familiar dropped into a totally foreign context distanced even more by recent and continuing bloody strife. 

(Released by Zeitgeist Films; not rated by MPAA.)