A First in Afghan Film, and Harrowing Credits

“FireDancer,” the first Afghan film to be submitted for an Academy Award nomination, made its Southern California premiere Sunday with a background story worthy of its own movie.

For starters, the producer is accused of decapitating the director and stuffing the head in his refrigerator.

And when the movie was shown last year in the same Kabul stadium where the Taliban had executed its enemies, the filmmakers were caught in a tug of war between fundamentalists protesting scenes of women in sleeveless dresses and moderates who cheered Western clothing.

Then, to comply with Academy rules that the film play in its nation of origin, producers carried the film from one Kabul theater to another by bicycle.

The movie was filmed mainly in New York by crew members each with dual U.S. and Afghan citizenship, and with a cast of amateurs. It tells the story of Haris, whose parents sent him away from his homeland as a boy when the Soviets invaded in 1979 and who searches for his roots in the Afghan American community.

“FireDancer” explores the universal struggle of immigrants trying to find their identity between the Old World culture of their parents and the new ways of the United States, as did the enormously successful “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”

Afghans who attended the screening in Beverly Hills said the film told stories that they had lived, from their parents’ attempts to arrange marriages to the gossipy nature of their small immigrant community.

“I cried,” said Shahla Amin, 36. “I couldn’t stop. My mother said it’s just a movie. I said, ‘No.’ ”

The movie will make its official U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in May. Soon afterward, the producers plan screenings in rented theaters in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Toronto and Washington, D.C., each with large Afghan communities.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which will consider movies from more than 50 countries for best foreign-language film, will announce five nominees Feb. 11.

“FireDancer,” in Dari with English subtitles, was written and directed by the late Jawed Wassel, who turned his unpublished 700-page novel into a screenplay. The film was six years in the making.

Wassel, the son of an army general, was 2 when his father died. His mother sent him out of the country after the Soviet invasion, and he grew up in a German orphanage. He studied filmmaking at Hunter College in New York and engaged in the all-American passion of writing scripts while sitting at a Starbucks.

Wassel and his crew raised about $600,000 from Afghan Americans, and the remaining $400,000 came from publisher John Roche.

To help raise money, Wassel enlisted a friend from his college days, Nathan Powell, as producer.

Baktash Zaher, star of the movie, said the two men had not been getting along. He said Powell wasn’t spending much time on the film and that Wassel told him he didn’t want to work with the producer any more.

The night after an October 2001 screening of “FireDancer,” police found Wassel’s body parts in two boxes in Powell’s van. His head was found in the refrigerator of Powell’s apartment. Powell was charged with murder.

Police said the two men had argued over the film, then Powell hit Wassel in the throat with a billiard cue, stabbed him several times and cut up his body with a hacksaw.

“We were in shock,” said Vida Zaher Khadem, the associate director and sister of the film’s star. “We’re still in shock. We’ll always be in shock.”

Filming was finished by then, and Khadem took over the completion of the film.

Khadem, very much the modern Afghan American, in stylish black jeans and a powder blue sport coat with windowpane embroidery, is the granddaughter of a well-known Afghan poet, philosopher and senator, Qymuddin Khadem. She left Afghanistan with her family when she was 6 or 7. She returned twice, when it was under Taliban rule, to film documentaries. On one trip, her uncle denounced her.

“He said I was a corrupt American and not Afghan,” she said.

The producers brought “FireDancer” to Afghanistan in September. The first screening was held Sept. 5 in Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium, on a 50-by-75-foot screen, hand sewn from parachute silk. The same day, two bombs killed two dozen people in a nearby market and an attempt was made on the life of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Still, 2,000 people showed up, starved for culture after the Taliban days when TV and movies were banned. Five spectators, Khadem said, were women.

While the film was playing, the screen suddenly went black. “There was a bunch of screaming and yelling,” Khadem said. About a dozen fundamentalists were gathered around the projector, complaining about the dress of the women on the screen. Not only were their arms showing, but there was cleavage and short skirts.

Khadem came up with the solution. She took off her trench coat and passed it in front of the projector during those scenes, like a matador.

But that led those of a more tolerant inclination to start yelling and screaming. “It became a peep show,” she said.

The film was such a hit that a local producer suggested they enter it for an Oscar in best foreign language film, a first for Afghanistan.

To meet academy rules, the film had to be screened for a week in its home country. Each day the film was screened at a different theater, each building riddled with bullet holes.

By the second showing, word of the film had spread. All shows sold out, Khadem said. Tickets were being hawked on the black market, and security guards had to whip people to keep them in line. “We’re hoping to have this kind of problem [if] we open in Westwood,” Roche said.

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Times staff writer Lorenza Munoz contributed to this report.