DVD Release: The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan

DVD Release Date: Feb. 28, 2012
Price: DVD $25.00
Studio: Microcinema


The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan movie scene

Eight-year-old Mir is The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

The 2004 documentary film The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan follows a year in the life of an eight-year-old boy named Mir who lives in the ruins of the ‘Buddhas of Bamiyan,’ once the tallest stone statues in the world and Afghanistan’s foremost tourist attraction until they were destroyed by the ruling Taliban government.

British film-maker Phil Grabsky travelled alone to central Afghanistan a few months after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001 with the aim of making a film that would explore the lives of ordinary Afghans. Young Mir caught the filmmaker’s eye and over the course of four seasons, he followed Mir’s life against the magnificent backdrop of Bamiyan and its ruined statues. As Mir grows over the course of the year, the adults around him reveal what life has been like over the past two decades, a period in which hundreds of thousands of children like Mir have been killed. But although Mir’s family and neighbors are so poor they literally eat grass, Mir’s cheerfulness and inquisitive nature shows that optimism and human tenacity can go a long way.

The critically lauded The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan rolled out to a handful of international film festivals in 2004 and was previously issued on DVD in England in 2006. Microcinema’s release of the disc marks its DVD debut in the U.S.

Check out the trailer:

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.