KABUL: Afghan Film is a dingy mid-century block in a small compound in central Kabul. It is in a security zone. Outside, a fat German soldier in a scarlet beret directs traffic away from a road accident. January has wrapped the worn-out city in a cold gauze of wood smoke and exhaust fumes. Blankets for overcoats and woollen hats are only partial comfort when there aren't enough socks to go round.

The director Siddiq Barmak strides in, bringing with him the warmth of success. His film, Osama, the first Afghan feature to be made since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, has sold worldwide after a good reception at Cannes last year. His co-workers at Afghan Film are demonstratively fond of him, as provider and talisman of better times. People come and go from his office while we talk. They seem like people who would, in the Russian manner, bring their boss flowers on his birthday.

Barmak rips through a pile of post. He studies a certificate from the 8th International Film Festival of Kerala, naming Osama best film in the competition section. "I didn't know I'd won that," he grins.

Osama, Barmak's first full-length feature film, is a self- contained tragedy about a young girl forced by her mother and grandmother to dress as a boy in order to find work in Taliban- controlled Kabul. Her deception is discovered, with cruel consequences. In Afghanistan, where the film has had short runs in three of the Kabul cinemas still standing, it cannot escape being viewed through the cracked lens of politics, language and residual suspicion that is the legacy of two decades of war.

Like every Afghan, Barmak is a survivor, and he has survived only through making the hardest choices: whether to study film in Moscow while the Soviets were occupying his country (he went to Moscow); when to flee, and when to return (he fled and returned twice); and, as an ethnic Tajik and Dari speaker, which of Afghanistan's two predominant languages should he make his film in, Pushto or Dari? He chose Dari.

"I, as a Dari-speaking Tajik, understand that Pushto is a wonderful language. I must speak in that language too," he says. "And they have to understand that Dari is a very great historical, and in some ways powerful, language. But they don't accept that. They consider Dari destroys Pushto, don't allow it to flourish. It's not true. It depends on them."

It is not a trivial issue. While we are speaking, in another part of Kabul, in a gigantic tent, hundreds of delegates from across Afghanistan are reluctantly agreeing to the issues that for five weeks have prevented them completing a new constitution. Should the national anthem be in Dari or Pushto? Which languages should be official? (Last week, it was decided that both languages would be official.) The war generation has divided the country so that languages have come to be seen as badges of allegiance: Dari to the west, to Russia, America and Iran, to secularism; Pushto to the south, to Pakistan, the Taliban and fundamentalism. I had barely arrived in Kabul before I met a member of the Kabul intelligentsia complaining that Osama was too "Iranian".

Barmak is an optimist, and I never saw him more downcast in the time we spent together than in contemplating the likelihood that in its homeland his anti-Taliban film would be considered by many as a Dari film aimed against Pushto speakers.-Dawn/The Guardian News Service.