Babak Payami (kein Titel)

Then during the post-production work on my next film Secret Ballot (2001) in italy I put together enough resources to initiate a project based on my story of an Afghani labourer deported from Iran who seeks to find and kill Osama Bin Laden in order to win himself a home. The story was loosely mldelled on Conrad's Heart of Darkness with some original twists. I was supposed to visit the Afghanistan/Pakistan border area in late October 2001 to organise the production, but then September 2001 happened and everything fell apart. I felt then that I would be riding on sensationalism whereas before 9/11 the hunt for Bin Laden and what happened to Afghanistan were concepts not many people cared about.

In: Sight and Sound. Juni 2004