01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 7, 2005

BY MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer

The subject of Liz Mermin's documentary The Beauty Academy of Kabul, showing tomorrow at the Newport International Film Festival, certainly sounds frivolous:

In the war-ravaged capital of post-Taliban Afghanistan, six American beauticians come to show the latest in hair design and makeup to women who wish to open their own shops.

Is this the thing these war-weary people really need?

It turns out that: Yes it is!

Hair and makeup instruction is an attempt to bring normalcy to a city of bombed-out buildings and rifle-carrying soldiers on the streets. Indeed, at one point the women running the school are annoyed by the buzzing helicopters overhead, until they learn that it's for their own protection.

Mermin gets into the lives of both the women who have come from the United States at great risk (three of them Afghan natives who are back in their homeland for the first time in more than two decades), as well as the all-female beauty academy students. Some of their stories are heart rending.

The Beauty Academy of Kabul is often surprising. Mermin has given a quick but effective newsreel history of Afghanistan and how a once prosperous-looking city became a bombed-out wasteland. We also discover that even after the Islamic fundamentalist Talibans came to power and women were ordered to wear the head-to-toe burkas that covered every part of their bodies when they ventured outdoors, some women still operated hair salons out of their homes. "Even the Taliban wives came," says one beauty academy student. Of course, she adds, once these women left the salon and smothered themselves under the shroud-like burkas, their new hairdos and makeup were ruined.

It's often emotional -- the two Afghan returnees are shocked to see their old neighborhoods in ruins; one recalls how she left shortly after her husband was killed fighting the Soviet invaders.

Sometimes it's funny. An outgoing American teacher drives through the streets of Kabul and shakes up passersby in a city where for years women were forbidden to drive.

Most often, however, it's uplifting. The happiness of the students as they accomplish their goals, the women who crowd the school on the opening day and almost break down the doors to get in, are wonderful indications that the beauty academy truly is, as one of its founders says, "an oasis in the middle of chaos, a paradise in the middle of hell."

As members of the first graduating class receive their diplomas, you may want to cheer. As one teacher puts it, "We're healing a country woman by woman."

The Beauty Academy of Kabul will be screened at 3 p.m. tomorrow at the Newport Art Museum and at 11 a.m. Sunday at the Opera House 3 cinema as part of the Newport International Film Festival. Tickets are $10. For more festival news, visit www.newportfilmfestival.com or phone the box office at (401) 845-2005.

The Beauty Academy of Kabul Rated: Not rated, contains wartime images.