In Detail

This documentary following one boy’s life in Afghanistan feels like a brutal, desperately sad companion piece to Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’. Its co-directors, the British documentary-maker Phil Grabsky and Shoaib Sharifi, first started filming Mir Hussein aged seven in 2002, and they haven’t stopped.

They have already made two previous films – ‘The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan’ (2004) and ‘The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan’ (2011) – and this third gives us the complete picture: Mir, pulled along by time’s current from boyhood to the present day, married with three kids in Kabul. To be honest, it’s the opposite of life-affirming.

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