They capture the other Afghanistan

During the shoot of her first feature film, Three Dots, Afghan filmmaker Roya Saadat, 28, faced an unusual problem.

“My lead actress’s husband threatened to divorce her, since he had problems with her talking with her on-screen husband,” says the director. The crisis eventually blew over, but for Saadat, who was a university student at Herat at the time, it was part of her “self-taught” understanding of cinema.

“You have to be determined to make the film, and because everything else is lacking, you must make up for that in willpower.” Saadat is no stranger to crises. Three Dots, which tells the story of a young woman forced into the drug trade to fend for herself and her children, was shot in harsh conditions in the desert around the Afghan-Iran border.

Her new feature, Playing The Taar, deals with a young girl from the Turkeman-Afghan community, who is trapped in a loveless engagement. “During the shooting, men from the community told me I had to stop the film since it shows their traditions in a bad way. I told them, I am a woman. I worry for women everywhere. Their stories don’t belong to you.”

With a new generation of Afghans finding their voice in cinema, a small number of women are also picking up the camera. And unsurprisingly, they are turning towards ‘invisible’ topics. 

“Men think a lot about the market and business,” says Sediqa Rezaei, 30, director. “Women think about things closer to the heart.”

Rezaei grew up in Iran and moved to Kabul five years ago to help rebuild her country. She stumbled into documentaries rather reluctantly after a brief stint in a UN agency, but found they were the “best way to create conversations about issues.”

But in a country where theatres prefer to screen 1980s Bollywood hits over local cinema, and filmmaking is still tainted with stigma, it is “hard enough to be a filmmaker, but even harder to be a woman trying to make movies,” says Rezaei.

Despite coming from a liberal family, and being married to a filmmaker, Rezaei faced ostracism from her extended family. “Besides, men can concentrate just on their work, but it is harder for a woman to look after work and the home.” During the shoot of her last film, her infant son was only a few weeks old.

“I would take him to the location and feed him between shots. For me, there is no division in being a mother, director and woman — they all link to each other.” Her documentary, Bricks And Dreams, is about a boy who works as a labourer in a brick kiln, showing his friendships, his occasional visits to his family and his dreams for a better life.

“As a mother, I will resist anyone hurting my child. This film has the same idea — to fight for the children of Afghanistan,” says Rezaei. “When I started making my first film, there were no women even in journalism. Now there are women making documentaries even in small towns. It is easier, but still not ‘easy’,” says Saadat.

For both women, the appeal of cinema is to show the ‘real’ Afghanistan, beyond its image of constant war and violence. “I don’t accept this idea the world has of my country,” says Rezaei. “Afghanistan has a lot of beauty that I want to show in my films. It is a terrible beauty, but one we can make better in the future.”

Saadat’s TV show, The Secrets Of This House, was touted as the first series to focus on the lives of an Afghan family with its problems and small joys. While it became popular, Saadat often found it pitted against the mass appeal of Indian soaps, with their domestic dramas and their elaborate plot twists. “They show working women as vamps, and say that decent women should stay at home,” she shrugs in disbelief. “For Afghan men, that is the perfect world.”

Saadat is currently working on a new show based on a group of college students and their lives. Recently, she got a call from someone she only refers to as ‘an important man’. “He said that I take money from foreigners and show Afghan women in a bad way, and that I must stop.” But Saadat insists such incidents do not make her feel unsafe. “Cinema is the best way to voice the stories of my people; of all people,” she says. “I cannot think about these things when I work.”