Osama 2004
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.
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.
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.
A historic drama with musical Bollywood scenes. Kabul in the early 90s. Soviet values rule the country. Women can wear miniskirts, children can go to school and people can go to the cinema, concerts as well as universities. Life in Afghanistan is similar to life in the Western world. 14 years old Qodrat sells cinema tickets on the black market in the streets of Kabul. After selling a ticket to a secret police officer by mistake, he ends up at the Soviet orphanage, where he fakes his identity at the registration, in hope of getting more power. Everyday life for Qodrat is about friendships, falling in love, doing naughty things and going on adventures – just like it is for children in other parts of the world. However, behind the safe walls of the orphanage the world they once knew is drastically changing as the Mujahideens start the civil war.
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.
In 2015, the Taliban put a price on the head of Hassan, a filmmaker, who was forced to flee Afghanistan with his wife and two young daughters. Using their camera phones, the fugitives show first-hand the many dangers refugees face when seeking asylum in a safe place.
A young camera operator falls head-over-heels in love with a married TV reporter, who is twice her age. The clash between intense love and the beliefs of Afghan society creates 'unheard' ways of being together and handling romantic life.
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.
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.
In a country offering almost no treatment services despite a crisis of addiction, Laila Haidari took the highly unusual decision to found her own pioneering addiction treatment center and a restaurant where all of the waiters are recovering heroin addicts. A deeply personal perspective on the global addiction epidemic, the film follows the labor of love of one woman fighting to keep her center alive in the face of physical threats, governmental opposition and the departure of the international community from Afghanistan.
A sweet musical about a poet and an independent woman, two friends who really love each other, with a bit of a Cyrano twist when the poet's best friend asks him to court the woman on his behalf. All ends happily though, unlike in most Afghan films.
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.
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.
Jawed Taiman takes a distinct look at Afghanistan and lets the Afghan people have their say. En route through the different provinces, through urban and rural regions, in discussion with intellectuals and simple folk, politicians and Taliban fighters a multifaceted picture emerges of a country that is often portrayed as incomprehensible.
In the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, a widowed father expects his only son to follow in his footsteps. Darra Adam Khel is home to the ethnic Pashtuns. The local industry is the handcrafting of firearms. It has been this way since long before the war on terror. Eleven-year-old Niaz Afridi works with his father learning how to make and test weapons just as Sher Alam learnt from his father before him. But Niaz doesn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps. He wants to go to school.
Trashy Lollywood flick follows a young woman who on her wedding night, is raped by a gang of criminals. She’s then forced to endure the torment of watching her husband to-be, beaten and hung from the rafters using only her shoulders to keep him grasping onto life. When she eventually collapses he falls to his death sending her on a killing vendetta.
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.
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.
When you lose everything, can a game save your dreams? The film follows two Afghan brothers: Sir (21), Allahverdi (17) who live in illegal housing together with around twenty other men. Cricket, an unusual sport for Turkey, is the biggest passion of these migrants, where they feel at home and forget all their troubles. The film juxtaposes the daily-life images of those immigrants in an observational style with a cricket match accompanied by an entertaining live commentary. Through the eyes of Afghan refugees in Turkey, we learn how cricket becomes a tool of resistance, while the cricket field becomes a piece of home.
The film is yet another variation on the familiar rape and revenge theme (I Spit on Your Grave territory). This time around we are shown that the vengeful, vice-busting Cat-Beast is the result of a ghastly gang rape which ended up with her birth (five minutes later) in some dark cave in the woods one stormy, cursed night. Her mother died upon child birth and the helpless infant was taken in by a stealthy black cat who was roaming the forest that fateful night and decided to adopt a human infant. This is how the child grew to become the awesome Cat creature – a cheerful, overworked domestic maid servant by day and crime busting Super Cat-Beast by night with special powers.