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”.
