AFP, LOS ANGELES
A rare inside account of the tyranny of the Taliban and their impact on Afghan women hits screens next week with the smartphone-filmed documentary Bread & Roses.
Produced by American actress Jennifer Lawrence and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, the feature-length film depicts the daily asphyxiation endured by half the population of Afghanistan since the withdrawal of US troops paved the way for the Taliban to seize power.
“When Kabul fell in 2021, all women lost their very basic rights. They lost their rights to be educated, to work,” Lawrence said in Los Angeles. “Some of them were doctors and had high degrees, and then their lives were completely changed overnight.”
Malala Yousafzai and director Sahra Mani attend the Los Angeles premiere of Bread & Roses at the Hammer Museum on Thursday.
Photo: Reuters
The documentary, which debuted at Cannes in May last year, was directed by exiled Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani who reached out to a dozen women after the fall of Kabul.
She taught them how to film themselves with their phones — resulting in a moving depiction of the intertwined stories of three Afghan women.
In the documentary, Zahra, a dentist whose practice is threatened with closure by the Taliban, is suddenly propelled to the head of the protests against the regime. Sharifa, a former civil servant, is stripped of her job and cloistered at home, reduced to hanging laundry on her roof to get a breath of fresh air. Taranom, an activist in exile in neighboring Pakistan, watches helplessly as her homeland sinks into medieval intolerance.
“The restrictions are getting tighter and tighter right now,” Mani said on the film’s Los Angeles red carpet, adding that hardly anyone outside the country seems to care.
“The women of Afghanistan didn’t receive the support they deserved from the international community,” they said.
Since their return to power, the Taliban have established a “gender apartheid” in Afghanistan, the UN has said.
Women are gradually being erased from public spaces: Taliban authorities have banned postsecondary education for girls and women, restricted employment and blocked access to parks and other public places. A recent law prohibits women from singing or reciting poetry in public.
The Taliban follow an austere brand of Islam, whose interpretations of holy texts are disputed by many academics.
“The Taliban claim to represent the culture and religion while they’re a very small group of men who do not actually represent the diversity of the country,” said Yousafzai, an executive producer of the film.
“Islam does not prohibit a girl from learning, Islam does not prohibit a woman from working,” said the Pakistani activist, whom the Taliban tried to assassinate when she was 15.
The documentary captures the first year after the fall of Kabul, including moments of bravery when women speak out against repression.
“You closed universities and schools, you might as well kill me,” a protester shouts at a Talib threatening her during a demonstration.
The gatherings of women — under the slogan “Work, bread, education” — are methodically crushed by the regime. Protesters are beaten, some are arrested, others kidnapped. Slowly, the resistance fades, but it does not die: some Afghan women are trying to educate themselves through clandestine courses.
Three years after the Taliban seized power from a hapless and corrupt civilian government, few countries have officially recognized their regime.
In the wake of US president-elect Donald Trump’s re-election, the fundamentalists have made it known that they hope to “open a new chapter” in relations between Kabul and Washington, where a more transactional foreign policy outlook is expected to prevail.
For Mani, that rings alarm bells.
Giving up on defending the rights of Afghan women would be a serious mistake — and one the West could come to regret, she said.
The less educated Afghan women are, the more vulnerable their sons are to the ideology that birthed the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“If we are paying the price today, you might pay the price tomorrow,” she said.
Bread & Roses begins streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday next week.
