A Gandhi-like force for peace

She says she made six trips over the winding Khyber Pass. She dug into archives Afghan film officials sheltered from the Taliban. She managed impossibly smooth tracking shots on rutted streets using a makeshift dolly her Indian cinematographer built with skateboard wheels. A warlord became her guide and appears with her in production stills, standing in a rugged Afghan gully. She had her equipment thrown into the street by police. And she kept going back, using her Canadian citizenship and a widening network of connections to make her account of South Asia's least known great man.

For McLuhan, 62, the finished film completes a journey that started in September 1987 in Berkeley, when an acquaintance gave her "Nonviolent Soldier of Islam," a book by the late Eknath Easwaran, who knew Khan.

McLuhan says her long commitment to her project grew from her feeling about Khan's "uncommon greatness. And that was accompanied by, certainly, uncommon courage. I felt a depth of spirit that I simply wanted to know more about."

She's sitting in her Manhattan editing studio with a poster of Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" (her father made a memorable cameo in the movie) on a wall. The slightly built McLuhan speaks of her filmmaking adventure as if it was all somehow fated. She says that, upon receiving Easwaran's book, "I looked at it and thought, 'I don't know anything about this part of the world,' and three weeks later, at about 3 in the morning, I picked it up and felt all the electrons around me shift."

South Asian luminaries she interviewed included Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose memory of meeting Khan as a boy is one of the film's most intimate moments, and former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who makes it clear he doesn't view Khan as a Pakistani patriot (which Khan really was not, given his quasi-nationalistic ideal of a Pashtun homeland).

McLuhan has made two other films, one a fictional tale about twins -- she is a twin -- called "The Third Walker." She also made "The Shadow Catcher," a documentary about photographer Edward S. Curtis, and has written several books. She refers to Khan, whom she never met, as "BK," as if they were close friends.

As a sweeping narrative of a charismatic pilgrim's progress, "The Frontier Gandhi" has both actual history and certain qualities in common with Richard Attenborough's 1982 epic film "Gandhi," in which Khan plays a minor role. McLuhan follows the arc from Khan's start as the member of an aristocratic family in Charsadda, a town in the Peshawar Valley, to the disappointment his universalist ideals met -- as also happened with Gandhi -- with the partition of India.