A Few Cubic Meters of Love (2014)

Right then. Country number one. I've set myself the challenge of watching a film from every country on earth, working through them A to Z, and Afghanistan is where we begin. I'll be honest, I didn't know what to expect going in, and I came out the other side with genuinely mixed feelings.

A Few Cubic Meters of Love was submitted as Afghanistan's entry for the Academy Awards foreign language category, and it wasn't selected. Having watched it, I can see why, and I don't think that's an entirely unfair verdict. The film tells the story of a young working man and a young woman who've fallen for each other, keeping their relationship hidden from her father, who doesn't approve. And that, more or less, is the entire film. There's no real escalation, no twist, no moment where the plot shifts gear. It just sort of... is.

That's not always a problem, by the way. Plenty of quiet, slice-of-life films work brilliantly by placing you inside a world and trusting you to soak it up. But for that to land, you need something to hold onto, some tension, some character depth, some emotional stakes that feel genuinely alive. Here, it's all a bit too light. The love story is sweet enough, and the performances are decent, the acting feels natural rather than stiff, but I never found myself particularly invested in what happens to these two people. When the credits rolled, I realised I'd been watching rather than feeling.

What the film does well, though, and I want to give it proper credit for this, is the window it opens onto everyday Afghan life. We're so used to seeing Afghanistan through the lens of conflict, whether that's news footage or war films, that it's genuinely striking to just watch ordinary domestic existence play out. The small details accumulate: the infrastructure, the resources people have access to, the rhythms of daily life that are so different from what I take for granted sitting here in Scotland. There's a moment where the male lead says, quite literally, "I'm rich," and the gap between what that means for him and what it would mean for most people watching this in a Western country is quietly staggering. The film doesn't lecture you about it. It just shows you, and lets you reckon with it yourself. That's worth something.

So I'm left somewhere in the middle. As a piece of storytelling, it's thin. As a document of a place and a people, it's quietly valuable. I suspect if this had come from a country with a longer cinematic tradition and more resources behind it, it would have been sharper, more confident in what it wanted to be. The Iranian film industry, for instance, has produced some remarkable work that operates in a similar quiet register but with far more to say. If you want to see that kind of slow, domestic drama done at its absolute best, A Separation (2011) is about as good as it gets, and that film proves you don't need bombast to keep an audience gripped.

But I'm not going to be too hard on A Few Cubic Meters of Love. It's a modest film doing what it can with what it has, and for a country that has faced what Afghanistan has faced, just getting a film made and submitted to the Academy Awards is no small thing. I came away knowing a little more about a place I knew almost nothing about, and that counts for something in my book.

Two and a half stars. Country one, done. On to the next.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2014  | Watched: 2025-05-20

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