liberation from a bottle of shampoo?

i just saw a truly amazing and inspiration movie documentary at the belcourt theater in nashville called The Beauty Academy of Kabul. the story is about some american hairstylists who go to kabul, afghanistan to open a beauty school for the women there. i went into the cinema expecting to get a few laughs out of it and then go home. i wasn't really taking it seriously. but i was, in fact, very touched and moved by this film.

first of all, the courage it took those six american women to go to kabul and open a beauty school is extraordinary. they were dealing not only with an entirely different culture and language, but they had to actually renovate the space to make it suitable for a beauty school. the afghani men who were helping with renovations were not used to having women tell them what to do, which brought about a whole new set of struggles.

but once this school opened up, so many women wanted to be in the first class that they ended up having to literally draw names out of a hat. many of the women taking the course had been hairdressers before the taliban came into power, and some of them continued to work in secret out of their homes under the taliban government. some of the women had never done hair before. but the one thing they all had in common was how much they wanted to learn. the teachers kept commenting on how quickly they were all learning and what outstanding students they were.

there was also some commentary on the homelives of the women in the course. most of them were married, but not to men they had chosen for themselves. the ones who were married were very fearful of their husbands. they didn't wear makeup because their husbands said they shouldn't. one woman couldn't come to class for two days because her mother-in-law was sick and her husband told her she couldn't go. but these women persevered. they had survived something i could never dream of living through--the taliban. yet they were all happy and smiling. the confidence they gained from taking this course was something they could pass on to other women.

toward the end of the course, they started accepting clients for free so that the students could have practice doing real hair. again, more women showed than they could handle. they were literally having to push women away fromt the doorway in order to shut the door. upon leaving, one woman said she felt the best she had ever felt because of a haircut.

one of the american hairdressers mentioned during the movie, "i'm a hairdresser, i heal people." and these afghani women would be healing the city, one woman at a time.

this was an inspirational, emotional, and sincere movie about real life. you should all go see it.

here are some other articles/reviews you may be interested in reading:
bbc.co.uk
l.a. weekly
chicago tribune