A rare testimony, filmed with a smartphone in hand, at the heart of the tyranny of the Taliban: “Bread & Roses”, a documentary on the ordeal of Afghan women, is the kind of film from which one does not emerge intact.
Supported by actress Jennifer Lawrence (“Hunger Games”) and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, this feature film immerses the viewer in the daily asphyxiation suffered by half the population in Afghanistan since the withdrawal of troops. Americans and the return to power of religious fundamentalists.
“When Kabul fell in 2021, all women lost their fundamental rights. They lost the right to be educated and to work,” Jennifer Lawrence reminded AFP on Thursday in Los Angeles, who came to promote this film that she helped produce. “Their lives were completely turned upside down overnight.”
Presented at Cannes in May 2023, this documentary directed by Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani is released on Apple TV+ on November 22.
After the fall of Kabul, the exiled director contacted around ten women who remained there and taught them to film themselves with their phones, to document their resistance.
The result is a moving film, where the intertwined destinies of three Afghan women reflect the decline of the country's women.
– “Enorme silence” –
We thus meet Zahra, a dentist whose practice is threatened with closure by the Taliban, suddenly propelled into the leader of demonstrations against the regime.
Then Sharifa, a former civil servant deprived of a job and confined to her home, reduced to hanging laundry on her roof to get a breath of fresh air.
And finally Taranom, an activist in exile in neighboring Pakistan, who watches helplessly as her homeland sinks into obscurantism.
“The restrictions are becoming more and more severe,” regrets Ms. Mani to AFP, denouncing the “enormous silence” of the international community. For the filmmaker, “Afghan women did not receive the support they deserved.”
Since their return to power, the Taliban have established “gender apartheid” in Afghanistan, according to UN terminology.
Women are gradually being erased from public space: currently, Afghan women can no longer study beyond primary school, go to parks, sports halls, beauty salons, or almost leave their homes without a chaperone.
A recent law even prohibits them from making their voices heard in public. All this in the name of an ultra-rigorous application of Islamic law.
“The Taliban claim to represent the culture and religion (of Afghanistan), when they are just a small group of men who do not represent the diversity of the country,” Malala Yousafzai told AFP, executive producer of the film.
“Islam does not forbid a girl from learning, Islam does not forbid a woman from working,” recalls this Pakistani activist, whom the Taliban attempted to assassinate when she was 15 years old.
– Incredible bravery –
Filmed over a year after the fall of Kabul, the documentary captures moments of incredible bravery.
“You closed the universities and schools, you might as well kill me!” says a demonstrator to a Taliban who threatens her during a demonstration.
Punctuated by the slogan “Work, bread, education!”, these gatherings of women are methodically crushed by the regime. The demonstrators are beaten, some are arrested, others kidnapped.
Little by little, the resistance is becoming more discreet, without dying down: some Afghan women are now trying to educate themselves through clandestine courses.
Three years after their coming to power, no country has yet officially recognized the government established by the Taliban. International diplomats regularly protest against the fate they reserve for women, without much effect.
In the wake of the election of Donald Trump, the fundamentalists indicated that they hoped to “open a new chapter” in relations between Kabul and Washington.
But giving up on defending the rights of Afghan women would be a serious mistake, according to Sahra Mani. Because the less educated Afghan women are, the more vulnerable their sons are to the ideology that gave birth to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
“If we pay the price today, you risk paying the price tomorrow,” says the filmmaker to Americans and Europeans. “The Taliban continues to prove that they remain the same.”
rfo/lpa
