Afghan film-maker Sahra Mani, creator of the rape-survivor documentary A Thousand Girls Like Me from 2018, brought her camera to Kabul to chronicle Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban in 2021 following America’s withdrawal. A strange mixture of amnesia and cross-party reticence means that this issue has not in fact featured much in postmortem discussions of the Biden/Harris administration. Women’s rights were immediately crushed by theocratic misogynists, and Afghanistan’s women cannot have been reassured by the response from the western anti-war left, notably the now notorious, breezily unconcerned tweet from Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis: “Hang in there sisters!”
Mani’s film shows three Afghan women hanging in there with zero help from anyone but themselves and, like Hasan Oswald’s film Mediha (exec-produced by Emma Thompson), this has been mentor-produced by big names: Jennifer Lawrence and Malala Yousafzai. Zahra Mohammadi is a dentist who, as something of a public figure, was immediately harassed and her practice – so valuable to all members of the community, both women and men – closed down by the bullies. The street sign advertising the existence of her business and indeed her own existence is instantly a focus for tension; she is “Zahra Mohammadi” on the sign rather than “Z Mohammadi”.
Taranom Seyedi is an activist who was forced into exile in Pakistan, and her addresses to camera have an anger and an urgency, tempered by anguish at the knowledge that her retreat from Afghanistan has allowed her more freedom to comment, but at the cost of effective expulsion. Sharifa Movahidzedeh is a former government employee who now has to be a housewife under what feels like house arrest, and her caged-up existence has its own awful sadness: this is how women’s lives in earlier years had gradually withered away, and now she sees those days are back.
Bread & Roses intersperses a lot of angry talk with brief glimpses of street tyranny, covertly filmed, and if some of the footage has a video-diary quality, this is due to the fact that the film has had to be made guerrilla-style, under the most desperately dangerous conditions. (That said, there needs to be a discussion about blanking out the faces of people who have not given legal consent to appear; it is distracting and inelegant. If faces need to be blanked, maybe the whole shot shouldn’t be used.) The film ends with a terrifying question about the fate of one of the women. It spreads an existential chill.
• Bread & Roses is on Apple TV+ from 22 November.
