Afghan director Sahraa Karimi delivers powerful plea for support at Venice Film Festival

Female Afghan filmmakers who fled the Taliban are begging the world to not forget the Afghan people and to support its artists amid the Afghanistan crisis. Taliban had captured the national capital, Kabul on August 15 after the elected government flee from the country, leaving the people in exile. The women spoke at a panel discussion at the Venice Film Festival to warn that a country without culture will eventually lose its identity.

Afghanistan filmmaker explains the plight of directors amid crisis

According to PTI, Sahraa Karimi, the first female president of the Afghan Film Organisation, got emotional while telling the media about the serious repercussions owing to the Taliban takeover of the country. She explained how various films in pre-and-post production, filmmaking workshops, insurance policies had got halted leading to a great loss. She even cited film archives that are now in the hands of the Taliban. “Imagine a country without artists, a country without filmmakers. How can they defend its identity?” PTI quoted her saying. 

Sahraa Karimi is the first woman to head Afghan National Film Body. Recently, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan Karimi wrote an open letter regarding the plight of her fellow filmmakers in the war-torn country. The filmmaker managed to flee her country shortly after Kabul fell into the Taliban’s grip. When the Taliban took over, the Afghan Film industry was juggling 22 films at different stages of productions. Earlier, The Afghan National Film Body Chief, Sahraa Karimi took to her Twitter and had written a lengthy letter post the fall of Kabul. A part of her letter read-

“To All the Film Communities in The World and Who Love Film and Cinema! My name is Sahraa Karimi, a film director and the current general director of Afghan Film, the only state-owned film company established in 1968. I write to you with a broken heart and a deep hope that you can join me in protecting my beautiful people, especially filmmakers from the Taliban. In the last few weeks, the Taliban have gained control of so many provinces. They 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 gauged the eyes of a woman, they tortured and murdered one of our beloved comedians, they murdered one of our historian poets, they murdered the head of culture and media for the government, they have been assassinating people affiliated with the government, they hung some of our men publicly, they have displaced hundreds of thousands of families. The families are in camps in Kabul after fleeing these provinces, and they are in unsanitary conditions. It is a humanitarian crisis, and yet the world is silent We have grown accustomed to this silence, yet we know it is not fair.” 

IMAGE: AP