While picking through rags and refuse in a wintry Kabul, a little girl rescues a button-eyed white puppy trapped in a smoking hellhole, where tormenting urchins wave a fiery circle of flaming torches above as they displace their accumulated aggressions on the sooty pup (“The dog’s looking for the Taliban!,” “She belongs to the Russians!.” “She was with the Americans! They killed our fathers!”). The girl and her brother carry the grateful animal to the women’s prison to spend a freezing night with their incarcerated mother, burning books on the stone floor to stave off frostbite. In this Afghanistan brutalized by oppressive religion, medieval morality, and western militarism, where humanity has been exfoliated down to its final layer, they are condemned to scramble for survival.
Facing possible execution, their mother sends them to the men’s prison to beg her forgiveness from their Taliban father. Her crime? Five years after he disappeared during the war, she married another man, now also dead. “What will we do if they kill Mom?” ask the frightened children. The father replies, “I went to war for God’s sake but your mother married. Good, now they can make love to each other in hell.” But here even the dead cannot be buried unless the gravediggers spread flames to heat the earth so that the pickaxe can get through the frozen gravel. 
Seeking shelter in a burnt-out madrasa, the near-starving children learn that their father’s friends have been taken to American prisons at Guantanamo Bay. Near a town dump bonfire, they find an abandoned Volkswagen Beetle fitted out with a TV where they uncomprehendingly glimpse footage of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center. The owner of this technological setup stands in the rubble, shaking his fist at an airplane passing far overhead, shouting, “Come down! The toilet is right here! You threw bombs and killed my wife! Come down and I”ll wash your ass with water!”
Starring: Gol-Ghotai, Zahed, Agheleh Rezaie, Sohrab Akbari, Jamil Ghanazideh, Agheleh Shamsollah, Razeddin Sayyar, Maydeh Gol, Ghomri Amir, Shah Golbahari
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Title: Stray Dogs (Sag-haye Velgard) (2006)Directed by: Marzieh Meshkini
Date of birth: 1969, Tehran, Iran
Writing credits: Marzieh Meshkini
Music by: Mohammad Reza Darvishi
Country: Iran / France
Language: Farsi
Color: Color
Runtime: 93 mins
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