DRIVE north of Kabul for an hour, turn left into a grey desert and head east for 15 minutes, the sand shawling up the side of the windows until an armed man in the uniform of the Iranian police stops you before a forbidding compound of watchtowers, mud walls and razor wire.

For a brief moment, that willing suspension of disbelief – I can see the inmates sitting on the sand beyond the iron gate – I forget that this is an Afghan movie set, and that Daoud Wahab, the producer of The White Rock, is sitting in front of me. “Looks real, huh?” he asks over his shoulder. It does.

Near-incredibly, as Afghanistan sinks back into the anarchy which was its natural state these past 29 years, Afghan film-makers are producing movies of quality, turning out pictures which prove, even amid war, that a country’s tragedy can be imaginatively recreated for its people.

Safaid Sang – Dari [Persian] for White Rock – was an Afghan refugee detention camp in Iran whose Iranian guards helped to massacre more than 630 of their prisoners, men and women, in 1998. The atrocity, largely unknown in the West, ended after two Iranian helicopters strafed the Afghans with machine-guns. Quite a story. Quite a movie.

”I’m really hoping for something big for this,” says Wahab. “We built all the mud walls, bought the razor wire, constructed the concrete lavatories – we even made fake shit to put all over the floor – and I found a real Iranian flag in the souk in Kabul.”

It snaps above us now in the desert wind, the silken split-onion symbol of the Islamic Republic between red and green. The guards even speak with the right accent because some are half-Iranian.

The Afghan actors squat beside an inner fence of wire, pleading with family visitors for help while the “guards”, immaculately dressed in near-perfect Iranian uniforms – Wahab and director Zubair Farghand searched the internet for photographs which showed cap badges and insignia of rank – shout abuse at their charges. One young man with an American rifle walks up to a “prisoner” and kicks him brutally in the back, then bashes him on the legs with a cosh.

”I think he enjoys beating these people; he’s grown into the part,” Wahab says sharply. He paid £30 for each of the 64 refugee tents to be sewn and patched together in the bazaar. They are a distressing backdrop to the White Rock camp where the dust and wind bleach out the colour of the landscape, below the foothills of the Panjsher Valley.

But unkind thoughts move through my mind. When the Third Reich was collapsing, didn’t Goebbels produce an epic about Frederick the Great to boost morale? And – while I made sure that Daoud Wahab didn’t take offence – wasn’t there a certain irony that his film was being shot scarcely three miles from the vast US base where Afghan prisoners are held in their hundreds, and where US personnel have sadistically tortured – perhaps still torture – their inmates. Why not make a film about this?

”If we get a chance, I’m sure we will,” Wahab says, “and there will come a time. Yes, there is a prison in Bagram, and there is mistreatment there, but now we are completing this earlier piece of history. We’ve told the Americans we are making this film here, just in case they wonder why there’s another ‘prison’ in the area.”

A camera moves through the prisoners on a “dolly” – a small railway track – while another is hoisted above them by crane. This is real movie-making, even if the entire budget is only £34,000. Homayoun Paiz sits down beside me, “blood” seeping through a wad of bandages wrapped round his filthy, bearded face. “I am the hero,” he announces. Does he die at the end of the film. “Of course,” Paiz says. “In the helicopter attack.”

Some Afghan prisoners managed to escape in the original six-hour massacre, and hid in the mountains. Daoud Azimi was among them and plays an Iranian police guard in the film. What does it feel like to wear the uniform of his oppressors? “I feel good,” he says, “because I can actually show the world what they did.”

We drive back to the broken highway to the east. An American convoy races past at speed, four-by-fours with blacked-out windows guarded by Humvees, US troops hunched over machine-guns on the roof. Daoud Wahab has plenty of material for his next film. No doubt Homayoun Paiz will play the hero. And die at the end.—Dawn-The Independent News Service