If you are a person born in the United States of America, whose parents were also born in the USA, and you have a Christian or a secular background and have not traveled extensively in other countries, I want you to imagine a place that is so different from where you live and a way of thinking that is so different from the way you think, that it will make your head spin. Can you do that? Can you try? It’s tough, isn’t it? But it can be done. To help you along, to help you manage this task, there are films, the best of which will take you to places you have never been and perhaps would never really want to go.

One such movie is Kandahar Break, a new independent film written and directed by David Whitney, which drops you into the stark landscape of Afghanistan — forbidding, dry, lonely, and frightening — a place that, pre 9/11, very few of you would have been able to find quickly on a world map.

For me, as a kid many years ago, Afghanistan was an almost mythical place mentioned in passing within the pages of one of my most beloved books, a volume of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories. In A Study in Scarlet, Dr. Watson informed me that he was wounded by a “Jezail bullet” at “the fatal battle of Maiwand,” a village not far from Kandahar. Now, of course, none of us any longer has the luxury of thinking of Afghanistan as a mythical place. Too many of our brethren have died there.

The main character in Kandahar Break, the tough but lovesick Richard Lee, played by Shaun Dooley, is a member of a team of British engineers who, in 1999, are trying to find and destroy land mines that spot the dangerous countryside. He’s working for the Taliban, which creates a big problem for him and a female Afghan interpreter named Jamilah with whom he has fallen in love. The local Taliban leader wants to replace her with a male interpreter.

It would be cruel of me to reveal more of the tightly woven plot, but I can say that every moment of this film is infused with edge-of-your-seat tension; and the small, short, violent skirmishes invoke a heart-pounding sense of the terrifying confusion that one must feel in battle. Kandahar Break is a compact thriller; the plot is not difficult to follow, so you won’t be spending a lot of time asking yourself what the heck is going on. Instead you’ll be lured out of the safe complacency of your comfortable living room and plunged emotionally into this strange place called Afghanistan that you should know so much more about.

Kandahar Break will be released on DVD by Peace Arch Entertainment on September 21, 2010.