A rare inside account of the tyranny of the Taliban and their impact on Afghan women hits screens next week with the smartphone-filmed documentary "Bread & Roses." Produced by actress Jennifer Lawrence ("Hunger Games") and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, this feature-length film immerses the viewer in the daily asphyxiation endured by half the population of Afghanistan since the withdrawal of US troops paved the way for the Taliban to seize power. "When Kabul fell in 2021 all women lost their very basic rights.
They lost their rights to be educated, to work," Lawrence told AFP in Los Angeles. "Some of them were doctors and had high degrees, and then their lives were completely changed overnight." The documentary, which debuted at Cannes in May 2023, was directed by exiled Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani who reached out to a dozen women after the fall of Kabul.
She tutored them on how to film themselves with their phones -- resulting in a moving depiction of the intertwined stories of three Afghan women. We meet Zahra, a dentist whose practice is threatened with closure by the Taliban, suddenly propelled to the head of the protests against the regime. Sharifa, a former civil servant, is stripped of her job and cloistered at home, reduced to hanging laundry on her roof to get a breath of fresh air.
And Taranom, an activist in exile in neighboring Pakistan, who watches helplessly as her homeland sinks into medieval intolerance. "The restrictions are getting tighter and ti.
