Sahraa Karimi (left in the photo), born in 1985, comes from the second generation of Afghan refugees in Iran. At the age of fifteen, she played as an actress in two Iranian films, which brought her to study cinema in Slovakia and graduated with a PHD of directing. During these years,she has made more than 30 short fictions and documentaries, some of which won numerous awards in international film festivals. After 10 years of making many shorts and documentaries, she returned to Kabul. She made two documentaries, “Afghan Women Behind the Wheel” in 2010 and “Parlika: A Woman in the Land of Men” in 2016, which were successful internationally. “Hava, Maryam, Ayesha” is her first feature film which was shot entirely in Kabul with Afghan actors and was screened in competition at Vesoul International Film Festival of Asian Cinema, where she also attended.
Karimi, who has just managed to escape Kabul with help from the Turkish embassy, sends a rather dire message regarding the taking over of Afghanistan by the Taliban.
“[The Taliban] will strip women’s rights, we will be pushed into the shadows of our homes and our voices, our expression will be stifled into silence. When the Taliban were in power, zero girls were in school. Since then, there are over 9 million Afghan girls in school. Just in these few weeks, the Taliban have destroyed many schools and 2 million girls are forced now out of school again,” said Karimi.
“Everything that I have worked so hard to build as a filmmaker in my country is at risk of falling. If the Taliban take over they will ban all art. I and other filmmakers could be next on their hit list,”
“In the last few weeks, the Taliban have massacred our people, they kidnapped many children, they sold girls as child brides to their men, they murdered a woman for her attire, they gouged the eyes of a woman, they tortured and murdered one of our beloved comedians, they murdered one of our historian poets, [and] they murdered the head of culture and media for the [now deposed] government,” her letter asserted.
The following interview with Roya Sadat (right in the photo), another prominent member of Afghan movie industry, sheds much light about the past practices of Taliban in Afghanistan
