Discoveries from Afghanistan World Cinema

2021, Afghanistan right before the Taliban’s return. Naru, the only camerawoman at Kabul’s main TV station, struggles to keep custody of her three-year-old son after leaving her serial cheater husband. Convinced no good men exist in her country, Naru is caught off guard when Qodrat, Kabul TV’s most important journalist, gives her a career opportunity. As the two crisscross the city reporting on its last days of freedom, sparks fly and Naru starts to doubt herself: could there actually be a good man out there?

In a war-ridden country, a woman watches over her husband, comatose from a bullet in the neck and abandoned by Jihad companions and brothers. One day, the woman decides to say things to him she could never have done before.

The story of four kids in Afghanistan whose lives changed dramatically after US troops completed their withdrawal and the Taliban swept to power

After the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the restriction of women in public life, a preteen girl is forced to masquerade as a boy in order to find work to support her mother and grandmother.

An Iranian expat journeys back to his homeland, where he must face his domineering father and grapple with complex emotions about family ties, cultural identity, and his place in the world.

Attempting to avoid the local army after capturing voters on election day to punish them, two armed men find themselves at the mercy of a mythical djinn. This supernatural folk story shines a light on the resilience of the Afghan people.

Bad behavior travels from the bedroom to the classroom to the beach in these six short films from Spain, France, Germany, Australia and Afghanistan that follow wayward boys and men for whom mischief and sexuality go hand in hand.

The story of Shaista, a young man who—newly married to Benazir and living in a camp for displaced persons in Kabul—struggles to balance his dreams of being the first from his tribe to join the Afghan National Army with the responsibilities of starting a family. Even as Shaista’s love for Benazir is palpable, the choices he must make to build a life with her have profound consequences.

In the year following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, young journalist Claude Baechtold finds himself in the war zone of Afghanistan. Not entirely voluntarily, the avowed anti-militarist is dragged by two fearless reporters on a round trip through the entire country.

Afghan documentary maker Najiba Noori offers not only a loving and intimate portrait of her mother Hawa, but also shows in detail how the arduous improvement of the position of women is undone by geopolitical violence. The film follows the fortunes of Noori’s family, who belong to the Hazaras, an ethnic group that has suffered greatly from discrimination and persecution.

Afghan refugee Samira goes on her first date in London with Harun, a second-generation British Afghan. Based on the 2018 shoet film of the same name.

There is a world beyond our world where men say NO to Women when it comes to the making decision. Most women suffer extreme inequality, but only few women accept dangers and fights against it.

The British Regisseur Phil Grabsky has documented an Afghan boy's life for 10 years.

In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, a woman walks into a chadari store in Kabul to buy her first full-body veil and face an uncertain future.

After the death of the family's matriarch, her husband and son must confront not only the corruption in society around them but the corruption within themselves.

Annie Goldson and Kay Ellmers’ doco, expanded from the film they made for Maori Television, takes a timely look at New Zealand’s military and media, notably journalist Jon Stephenson, in Afghanistan.

In rural Afghanistan, people are storytellers who make up and tell each other tales of mystery and imagination to explain the world in which they live. The shepherd children own the mountains and, although no adults are around, they know the rules; they know that boys and girls are not allowed to be together. The boys practice with their slings to fight wolves. The girls smoke secretly and play at getting married, dreaming of finding a husband soon. They gossip about Sediqa; she’s eleven years old and an outsider. The girls think she is cursed. Qodrat, also eleven years old, becomes the subject of gossip when his mother remarries an old man with two wives. Qodrat roams alone in the most isolated parts of the mountains, where he meets Sediqa and they become friends.

Kabul - a city struggling to recover from 25 years of warfare. Taxi driver Khaled picks up a woman and baby. Her face is hidden behind a blue burka. They settle on a price, she pays him and they drive off. The taxi arrives at its destination. The woman gets out and a new passenger climbs in... to find the baby still in the backseat. Khaled leaps out after the woman but she's vanished. He's left holding the baby - a 6-month-old boy. Who is the mother? How can he find her? He asks friends and strangers in the street. He returns to where he picked her up. Nothing. Fate has handed him a young life for which he feels more and more responsible. An eventful, chaotic, often highly comic journey through a city which is itself simply trying to survive. Poignant, rich, vibrant, Barmak Akram's debut feature is a remarkable portrait of one man's emotional awakening in a city returning to crazy life after 25 years of violent conflict.

Masoud and Sonny are two men who both want the same thing, open a restaurant. Unfortunately, they don't have much money. To earn money they both look for a job, until Masoud finds a job as a messenger for an important businessman. For this man, they have to take a vase to a mafia boss one day. In the meantime, Sonny has fallen in love with Soraya, who happens to be his employer's daughter. Inadvertently, Sonny involves Soraya in delivering the vase.

It’s snowing in Kabul, and gregarious waiter Mustafa charms a pretty student named Wajma. The pair begin a clandestine relationship—they’re playful and passionate but ever mindful of the societal rules they are breaking. After Wajma discovers she is pregnant, her certainty that Mustafa will marry her falters, and word of their dalliance gets out. Her father must decide between his culturally held right to uphold family honor and his devotion to his daughter.

Abdul Ahad Momand traveled to the Mir space station in 1988 as Afghanistan neared collapse – a moment of brief national hope that has since been largely scrubbed from public memory. Filmmaker Elham Ehsas weaves archival footage with personal history to trace that legacy and surface his own connection to Momand’s journey.

Elderly Dastaguir and his newly deaf 5-year-old grandson Yassin hitchhike and walk, but mostly walk, as they make their way to the coal mine where Dastaguir's son Murad works. Dastaguir must tell Murad that the rest of their family were all killed in a recent bomb attack.

With the Cold War about to break out in Afghanistan, young, lifelong friends Suraya and Sima must question their life choices and moral principles when they get involved in opposite sides of the conflict.

In 1979, after the Soviet Union attacked Afghanistan, millions of Afghans were forced to leave their homeland to save their lives, and in the meantime, a huge wave of them immigrated to Iran.

In an old library, two people trade book titles as secret codes-an exchange no one around them notices. But as tension quietly builds, one question remains: will the truth be uncovered?

Saddled by a senile grandfather and a neglectful father, Mina, an impulsive twelve-year-old Afghan street seller sees her future slipping away when she is forced to neglect her education and walk the streets of Kabul to support her fragmented family. In the seven days that follow her life, Mina’s quest to emancipate her father from the claws of a local drug dealer and her attempt to secretly attend school underlines the current struggle of a young generation of Afghans trying to shake off the echoes of oppression from the Taliban era that continues to haunt those who bore witness to it.

As the U.S. planned to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in September 2021, Canadian-Afghan filmmaker and journalist Brishkay Ahmed was filming IN THE RUMBLING BELLY OF MOTHERLAND. Revealing the ongoing dangers for women reporters, and the extraordinary risks they take, this brave film provides an in-depth look into Zan TV, Kabul’s female-led news agency. A professional journalist herself, Ahmed documents both the harrowing and inspiring work of young, female journalists over the course of the two-year lead up to the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Following parallel news stories as they unfold – two sets of national elections as well as ongoing U.S.-Taliban peace talks – the film reveals the daily hurdles Afghan female reporters and media staff face, underscoring the existential current events that threaten both Zan TV as a media outlet and the livelihoods of the women at its heart.

When Khatera, a 23-year-old Afghan woman, forces her father to stand trial after a lifetime of sexual abuse, she risks her family, freedom, and personal safety to expose a judicial system that incriminates the very women who seek protection.

Inside a confined cube, chaotic shadow dancers move without rhythm or order. A mysterious figure, seen only through fragments of a face, begins reshaping their world — pulling curtains, rebuilding space, and restoring structure to the movement. As the environment transforms, the dancers emerge from confinement into floating bubbles beyond the cube, where dance continues freely. A surreal meditation on dance as one of humanity’s oldest universal expressions of joy, emotion, and existence

For ten years, the journalists of the Etilaat Roz have been making the most widely circulated daily newspaper in Kabul—entirely transparent, and constantly on the lookout for abuses in society and politics. But what do you do when this work becomes practically impossible? This film follows the team as the city is recaptured by the Taliban.

In a remote area in Afghanistan, stories of the lives of a young shepherdess, a birdcatcher boy and a mourning teacher are intertwined after their school is burnt down. The young shepherdess takes the risk of saving a woman US soldier after a helicopter crash; the birdcatcher boy takes shelter in a tank with the birds, the pin-ups and the illegal music that he loves; and the mourning teacher seeks vengeance on the one who has widowed her…

Amid the destruction of Afghan cinema, a young boy rescues reels from a fire and carries them through Kabul, showing movies to people who rarely get the chance to see them.

In the high peaks of Afghanistan, young athletes from rival villages build makeshift wooden skis and convene for a mountain race that unites the community in a moment of peace and triumph just before their country’s collapse. Champions of the Golden Valley merges the triumphant spirit of a classic underdog sports story with the heartfelt portrait of a community finding hope amid disrupted dreams. Revealing a stunning unseen side of Afghanistan, it is an uplifting exploration of what it means to be a champion – in all its forms.

The film is based around the life of Emaan, a young, honest policeman who doesnt mind bending the rules to uphold justice. The story begins with the police investigating the rape and murder of a girl and soon after arresting the culprit. Emaans character, played by Rasool Emaan, is portrayed by the first sequence as a lonely, hardened man. The lonely Emaan meets and instantly takes a liking to a young woman who has been married against her wishes to an older man, who then deserted her along with their small daughter.

What happens when you can no longer practice the profession that is part of your identity? You Can’t Stop the Music is a portrait from today’s Afghanistan, where life in the shadow of the Taliban can at times seem surreal. When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, Akbar Adeli was a music student at Kabul University. For conservative Afghans, music had been suspect even before the Taliban takeover, but it soon became a gamble with one’s life – especially since Akbar plays Western pop music.

In March 2001, the ruling Taliban destroyed Afghanistan's foremost tourist attraction, the 1600 year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan. This film follows the story of one of the refugees who now lives among the ruins….an eight-year-old boy named Mir.

Afghanistan, 2016. Sikandar and Shab are final-year art students at Kabul University, both with a thirst for life. Amidst the ruins of war-torn Kabul, the couple and their friends spot an abandoned cinema, which miraculously survived 30 years of war. As an act of resistance against the looming return of fundamentalism, a bold dream is enacted and renovation work on the cinema begins. Serious problems soon arise: the withdrawal of powerful family support, the targeting of Shab by her extremist brother, an auto accident and a calamitous fire. Undaunted, Sikandar continues to pursue the dream.

Shot on the streets of Kabul, Granaz Moussavi’s (My Tehran For Sale) outstanding new feature is in the tradition of the great child-centred works of the 1980s when filmmakers such as Kiarostami, Panahi and Amir Naderi (to whom this film is dedicated) were putting Iranian cinema in the forefront of world production. 9-year-old Hewad is an irrepressible, street-smart kid who is energetically working every angle, hustling everything from pomegranate juice to amulets to protection from the evil eye. His real ambition is to be a movie star, and this comes a step closer when he meets an Australian photographer. But in a city where every family has a member who has been “martyred,” the streets are as perilous as they are vivid. Australia’s recent involvement with Afghanistan has been mixed, to say the best. The deeply-felt humanism of this film might just be our most effective contribution to that troubled country.

Little Statue" directed by Bahram Baryal, is a crime drama film. The story revolves around a gang of criminals who are hired for a mission to steal a golden statue recently discovered in Afghanistan. When their initial plan fails, they resort to kidnapping the daughter of the archaeologist who found the statue. Their goal is to force him to hand over the statue to them instead of the government. But things don’t go as planned…

Salim Shaheen film from Afghanistan

The doomed love story of Sher, a kitemaker, and his cousin, Tahera. A tale of Old Kabul, based on a short story by Akram Osman.

Afghan filmmaker Mithaq Kazimi documents injustices done to a targeted group of his neighbors, the Baha'is of Iran, by telling the life story of one current prisoner, Fariba.

In Jaan the filmmaker uses her mother’s forbidden cassettes and dance to tell the stories and show the spirit of Afghan women across generations.

In the remote mountains of central Afghanistan, a Hazara family embarks on a journey for truth and justice after their daughter Zahra mysteriously dies at Kabul University. Told through the eyes of Zahra's younger sister, Freshta, the film is a moving contemplation of love, loss, and perseverance in spite of increasing unrest on the eve of the Taliban takeover of the country.

In a mysterious, ruined world, AI toys awaken-and in the silence of the wreckage, they wonder why they have returned to life

An independently-produced dramatic feature that depicts Taliban atrocities committed from Kabul to the northern border during the dark era of Taliban rule in the late 1990s.

In Afghanistan many hundreds of boys, often as young as ten, are being lured off the streets on the promise of a new life.

For centuries the Afghan people threw back all invaders. But in 1979, the Russians invaded with planes and tanks. 5 million Afghans fled the country. 300,000 lucky ones made it to North America. They escaped the Russians but not themselves. This film depicts the lives of the members of two families in New York.

A man has left his country when his wife was killed during the war. Now he must go back to Kabul for wedding of one of his daughters. Unwillingly he gets involved in an internal conflict...

In 2019, in the high peaks of Afghanistan, two teenage boys from rival ethnic groups fight for the crown of their village’s annual skiing competition.

A 45 minute black and white film originally produced as part of a three-part anthology film called Rozgaran (each part with a different director). 'Talabgar' (directed by Khaliq Alil) translates loosely as 'the one who asks' and in the case of this 40-minute film the one who asks is specifically the man who asks a girl's parents for their permission to court their daughter.

Through a child's lens, The Honest Poet reveals a rarely seen side of Afghanistan, following 11-year-old Raheem on a journey through his country and into the homes and hearts of his people.

Sameer is a middle-class young man, who lives with his younger brother. He doesn't have much except a big house left by his parents. He is sick of seeing his country crumble before him. He has one sincere dream---that is to diminish the high crime rate of Afghanistan. Sameer is dyslexic so he cannot learn. He tries to make up for it by taking up martial arts, but lacks the focus to excel at it. One day, he comes across an old ancient necklace in an old run-down castle. He soon discovers that the necklace gives him the power of time. Whenever he or other civilians are in danger, Sameer uses the necklace to slow down the passage of time, providing him vast amount of time to devise a way of out danger. He uses the powers of the necklace to defeat high-profile mobsters of Afghanistan, thus making some powerful enemies.

With astounding access, Norwegian journalist and filmmaker Anders Hammer captures the rapidly changing situation in Afghanistan as the Taliban retake control of the country. Re-installing an all-male parliament, banning girls from going to school and restricting women’s rights to work, the Taliban soon find themselves faced with the emergence of groups who bravely take their protests to the streets. Amid all the uncertainty, Hammer documents the female-led protests, the supporters and enforcers of Taliban rule and the mixed response of people across the country, as one regime comes to end and another takes power.

An Afghan mother and a US filmmaker, connected through one stray bullet, forge a surprising friendship amidst America's longest war.

A historical epic that follows a family feud spanning two-generations that is played out on the buzkashi field and two young lovers who defy their families’ expectations and pay a tragic price.

Azim, an afghan refugee, who works at the municipality at night, lives in Tehran along with his family. Being the head of entire family, he has to choose between his own life and his mother’s whom he has always claimed as the most important one in his life.

A mild-mannered farm laborer becomes enraged when the landowner's spoiled son forces the laborer's wife to sing for a foreign guest.