Synopsis

Shot over a four-year period in the sprawling refugee camps of north-western Pakistan and in the war-torn city of Kabul, the documentary constructs a harrowing, thought-provoking, yet intimate portrait of the plight of Afghan women over the last 30 years—from the rule of King Zahir Shah to the current Hamid Karzai government.

Related Event

Theatre group Nafas will be performing prior to the screening.

Annemette Verspeak (Nafas), Zahra Qadir (Reel Afghanistan) & Mezgan Hakimy (Radio Sadaye Jawanan Voice of Youth / Afghan International Students Association) will discuss women’s rights in Afghanistan following the screening.

Full Description

Mixing the personal with the historically general, the first hand intimate account with archival footage, Meena Nanji’s polished documentary offers a very useful overview of contemporary Afghan women through three refugees: a teacher, a doctor and a women’s rights activist. At the same it skilfully traces the history of women’s Rights since the seventies. What has changed Nanji asks in her voice-over between the seventies and the present? A lot, and not much for the better.

Even though the Taliban have been ousted they’ve been replaced by some of the very people who were denying women’s rights back in the seventies. Where the king Zahir Shah was so liberal there were government drives offering women ‘masculine’ jobs (like bus driving) this was only the case in the larger cities. In the villages where the war lords held control, women were expected to conform to the most predictable of expectations. And who now runs the country? Mainly an alliance of war lords given power positions in Karzai’s government.

But then many would say why should it be any different just because the Americans ousted the Taliban? Back in the eighties, when the US were determined to tackle the Red Peril, they backed the more extreme groups who had been oppressing women in the villages for many years.

So it no surprise that the relatively radical feminist group from the seventies Rawa (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) are still on the streets protesting for women’s rights. At one stage a United Nations official goes to talk to them and says there are two women in the new government. But who are these women Rawa asks, and with such a question the UN official seems a bit stumped. He replies that they are Afghan women. It is entirely understandable that the women want more than that for a reply; after all, haven’t the UN, the Americans and the British all insisted that democracy is returning to Afghanistan even as some of the most brutal of figures in recent Afghan history are back in power? Figures like the thuggish Dostum and Fahim sit cheerfully in the parliament, while the late war lord Ahmad Shah Massoud can be found on numerous billboards. President Karzai, meanwhile, is conspicuously absent from the general landscape. The women are understandably asking for a bit more accountability and explanation.

So this is clearly an important work, but that doesn’t make it any kind of masterpiece. The director has a clear agenda and sticks to it, but sometimes the archival footage Nanji uses, while making her point succinctly enough, leves you wondering if there is more to the images than she extracts from them. When she cuts for example from an image of Afghan kids being indoctrinated under the Taliban, to show us how fanatical they have become ten or so years later, we might recall we’ve been shown this footage earlier in the film from a different context – and if anything it comes from ten year before and not after. These grown men were radical fundamentalists without the training. Also, while the archival footage of the parliament shows a generally happy event, Nanji’s voice-over suggests the exact opposite. It is not that Nanji’s wrong in her conclusions, not at all, just that we feel she uses footage not for its ambiguity, but for making singular points, and so the film lacks that querying, jaundiced approach present in, for example, Afghanistan: An Impossible State. For all that, this yet another extremely useful work helping us understand why Afghanistan has become a blighted rubble zone

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