A brief diversion: Carrom in Kabul

Everyone knows it: when you're immersed in a project, you don't always make sense to third parties, even to those sympathetically inclined. So hands up: I confess that when, at the last REACT workshop, I mentioned in passing that I was flying off to Kabul that weekend to film a short sequence of Carrom, I might as well have said that I was teletransporting to Planet Zog for a round of, er, Quidditch!

Now the main thing is for the finished film to be coherent, even though the process of getting there can be chaotic; but I feel I should briefly explain what this is all about. The truth is that I really did fly to Kabul (that's me in a carpet dealers on Chicken Street) to take part in the jury of the Afghanistan Human Rights Film Festival for a week which was a profoundly interesting experience; not least because I was accompanying my wife Hassina who was returning to the city she grew up in after a gap of three decades - emotional stuff, as I'm sure you can imagine. Also with the sheer number of Kalashnikovs in evidence on every street corner, not to mention the crazy traffic rules (there aren't any), probably a situation where The Risk Taker's Survival Guide could have come in useful...

However - I hear you all cry - what the heck has this all got to do with Boron Mon Amour? Well, there is a connection and that is very simply the game of Carrom, popular in South Asia, from Afghanistan to India. Also known as Karrom or even Karrambal it's a simple game played on a square board, a kind of hybrid between pool, checkers and billiards. It's simple but addictive and it won't be a surprise to mention that Hassina usually beats me with her eyes closed. There is actually a bona fide boron connection which I won't mention at this point, but the usefulness of the game is much more than just to feature as an entry in a list of the "everyday" uses of our favourite humdrum element. I've used games before as metaphors in my films, such as the board game Mensch ärgere dich nicht, a German variant of ludo which I borrowed for Friendly Enemy Alien. In Boron Mon Amour we're looking at ways to use carrom both as a formal, rhythmic element but also looking at how it might help connect the linear film with the interactive levels that Marcin is working on. It's quite difficult to articulate these ideas while they are forming, so I hesitate to go into further details now - the final proof will be "whatever works" - but I would wager that carrom will be one of the details that you'll take away from the experience.

Of course various carrom apps exist for tablets and smartphones - but do your own googling for once!

Want to see what the game looks like in action? I'm not going to use the rushes from Kabul at this point, but there's always YouTube. Not entirely convinced by the bombastic soundtrack, but here's a short trailer of the Men's Single Finals in Sri Lanka in 2012. Game on!