Rabia, the ten years old girl, is always “en route” and Ghost School is at first a film about roads and paths. Her walking on sometimes winding paths through sparse landscapes is either filmed in long shots or in traveling shots, sometimes she is filmed from a distance, sometimes there is a synchronicity between her movements and the movements of the camera. She walks in her worn out school uniform. In the morning or in the evening, she plays sometimes with her little brother. It is clear from the beginning that Rabia´s family is from a lower class and just to feed this family is a struggle. Just at the beginning, Rabia seems literally be thrown into this world and its stony ways. Before the film enfolds its fictive narration, it reveals a strong impression of a merciless reality. From time to time, the film allows Rabia to be distracted from her cheerless every daily routine in encounters with animals or short conversations with people.
One day, her school is closed. They tell her, the school is hunted and the teacher is posessed by a Jinn (a demon or spirit from the islamic mythology). During her almost continual walking through this film, she meets several people from different social classes. The poorer people tell her that there is no such thing as a hunted school or a possessed teacher. The rich land owners just want to close schools in the countryside. Their own children are sent to expensive private schools. The rich people say, it is God´s will and equality of opportunity of rich and poor children is an insult to God and there is nothing what one can do about it.
Seemab Gul´s film is inspired by this so-called ghost schools in rural Pakistan, where indeed village schools are closed for flimsy reasons. But Gul´s film is much more than a hint in social injustice in Pakistan. Sometimes, it is like an essay about the very concrete physical perceptible world and the more flexible interpretation of it, depending on power or in using pseudo-religious superstitious phrases. Rabia, at the beginning almost unprotected exposed to this world with its ideological lies and its inhospitably landscape. There is an fascinating correspondence between Rabias walking through this visible world and her questions that leads her piece by piece into the center of truth of her social reality hidden behind lies. Her movement into this center of truth is both, innocent but as well almost like a subversive thorn in this corrupt world.
The beauty of this film is, that Seemab Gul thinks her story cinematically and not didactic. She approached the social reality of a rural region of her country with crystal clear images and sounds. Sometimes it reminds me in some films by great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. But even more it evoked in me the memory what the International Filmfestival in Fribourg/Switzerland, I visited long ago, once was until the early 2000s. It was a time when some festivals in Europe were focusing only on films from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Ghost School, a film from Pakistan, a country hardly visible on big international film festivals, is a very exciting discovery from the Generation-section.
Ghost School is filmed in the classic Academy aspect ratio that was standard until cinemascope and other wide screen aspect ratios made their way into film theaters. To use this format in these days is mostly an artistic decision. Rabia is not only the main protagonist, she seems to me as well a metaphor for the spirit of this film. She has one thing in common with the filmmaker Seemab Gul - they both go their own way undeterred and uncompromising. Made for a very young audience, Ghost School is a surprisingly mature debut film. When it comes to auteur films for children or young people, I have seen quite a few things in this festival section over the last years.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Further screenings:
17.Feb, 13.00, Zoo Palast 2
18.Feb, 16.15, Cubix 6
20.Feb, 15.45 Filmtheater am Friedrichshain
22.Feb, 10.00 Zoo Palast 2
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