It goes without saying that anyone ambitious and courageous enough to undertake shooting a documentary on a shoestring budget in war-ravaged Afghanistan is well aware of the inherent danger. Still, having made the arduous journey from Kabul to the placid hills of Feyzabad in the country’s northeast, director Najeeb Mirza and cameraman Jimmy Bustos thought the danger was, more or less, behind them. “We thought we had come to this place of serenity,” Mirza recalls. “We were standing outside the guest house, looking over the mountains, and we were thinking ‘what would be the best spot to go and shoot from and get a nice picture of this town?’ At that very moment, the biggest explosion I have ever heard or felt took place, just near by. It was so strong that the waves shook the insides of your body, and you could feel the organs shift.”

Mirza and Bustos had travelled from Canada with Soorgul and Amir, two of the forgotten boys of Afghanistan — children who were sent to school in neighbouring Tajikistan by the Soviet occupiers before being stranded by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing civil war. As refugees in Alberta, they had not seen their immediate families in 16 years. Mirza documents their journey in true cinéma vérité style, allowing their stories to unfold with minimal comment and intrusion. He never really considered adding his voice and perspective to the narrative. “During the editing process, that was raised several times, and it’s something that I am not comfortable with,” says Mirza decisively. “I thought it would distract from the real story. It’s not a story about me and what I thought about what they were going through. It’s a story about them, and I wanted to make it as direct as possible.”

The universality of their search for family put Soorgul and Amir’s alienation in sharp relief. The Sweetest Embrace puts a human face on a reality that is all too common in Afghanistan. “At one point in time, one-third of the country’s population — about five or six million people — were refugees in either Pakistan or Iran,” Mirza explains. “Then another two million were displaced internally and another million were killed, so the story about kids being separated from their families or coming back and not finding them ever again is such a common story in Afghanistan — the reality so many Afghans have had to face.”

His respect and admiration for the Afghan people is palpable. “One thing that was very interesting is the people, despite the fact that they’ve endured 30 years of war, people everywhere we went accepted us with open arms. I was really surprised at the degree of hospitality,” he says. “People are absolutely tired of the war that they have been living for the last 30 years, and they are absolutely motivated to do whatever it takes to move forward.”

Although his film does show the significant cultural differences between Afghanistan and Alberta, Mirza would much rather focus on our similarities than our disparities. “If I summed it up into one line, it’s the realization that, those people elsewhere are just us in different circumstances.”

Ultimately, the Feyzabad explosion was discovered to be part of a road construction effort rather than an act of insurgency. The foursome’s resolve was shaken, but far from shattered, though their journey would become increasingly difficult. The final three days of their trek to Soorgul’s village were travelled on foot through the mountains with little food and limited water. “For us, it was only three days, but for the Afghans who live there, it’s every day,” Mirza says. “I think the thing that carried us more than anything else was the fact that these boys have to get home. There was nothing that was going to stop them.”