An Embattled Territory: On Afghan Cinema and Roya Sadat’s Feminist Gaze

In a state of perpetual embattlement, Afghanistan is currently in the throes of a Taliban resurgence—a regime historically remembered (and anticipated with renewed dread) for its extremist imposition of the Sharia law that effectively curtailed human rights (especially those of women and minorities) between 1996 and 2001. Roya Sadat, who grew up during their reign, continued to educate herself at home after being debarred from school. She later became an autodidact in the area of filmmaking as well. The first female director to have emerged in the post-Taliban era, Sadat’s cinema captured the wastelands of a purportedly post-conflict society and its constituent lives, with an empathetic gaze on female protagonists. Neorealist but without its tendency to aestheticise, her images counter Western imperialist tropes of oppression that were peddled by the mainstream media after the United States of America’s invasion and ousting of the Taliban in 2001. Departing from the former’s homogenising (and white saviour) rhetoric of “liberating” women from fundamentalist forces as part of their “War on Terror”, Sadat looks at the complex skein of patriarchy, class, race and religion to articulate internal hierarchies of violence and reimagine the agency of Afghan women in this context.  

Sadat’s first film, Seh Noktah (Three Dots, 2003), was penned clandestinely during the Taliban era. It was converted into a film after their fall, using equipment borrowed from journalists. After conducting a door-to-door search for actors for over a year, Sadat met a woman in a carpet-weaving factory who was the only one to react positively to the proposition of appearing on film. She had to subsequently resist a misogynist partner who successfully insisted on changing her name in the final credits to keep her participation in the film secret from their family. As a compromise against pulling her out of the film completely, the actor, Mojgan Joya, could not engage in extended dialogues with men on screen and her husband stood vigil over every shot. In tandem, the filmmaker’s gender put her at risk in public spaces as well. Filmed in the rural provinces surrounding the city of Herat, the crew’s presence provoked violent reactions from the locals, who lacked knowledge about—and therefore, distrusted—the medium. This led to the team changing sites multiple times and finishing principal photography in a compressed period of ten days. Working on precarious political ground, the film mirrored its conditions of prolonged drought, illicit narcotics trade, and their effect on vulnerable women―observations that stemmed from the filmmaker’s inward gaze on lived realities.

Edited in a wedding videography store by Sadat, the film follows the story of Gul Afrooz, a young widow with three children, who is seen toiling rigorously throughout the duration of the film to earn a living―thus already challenging the palatable trope of the passive victim. Using unromantic eyes to articulate her hardships, Sadat refuses to spectacularise Afrooz’s penury as she ends up becoming a drug courier for a local predator. As Mark Graham points out in his book, Afghanistan in the Cinema, the barren landscape and its monotone of dirt that permeated the vignettes in the film become a metaphor for an Afghanistan that now suffered from the extractions of local tribesmen in the absence of the Taliban. The promise of the USA’s post-invasion progress is revealed as hollow and impossible, as the women’s oppression continues in the same vein by warlords who are enabled in their exploitative operations by the same American government. The film then becomes an extended metaphor for continued Afghan suffering, evoking an overwhelming sense of grief that percolates into Sadat’s later work.

Bought and distributed by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Committee owing to its potent civic value, Seh Noktah was received with acclaim and opened many doors for Sadat as a filmmaker. Faced with constant fiscal challenges, she set up her own production company in 2003—the Roya Film House. Registered with her sister, Alka Sadat, it became the country’s first independently run film company and financed itself over the following years by producing television dramas for Tolo TV. Sadat subsequently co-founded the first women’s film festival in the country, enabling more female practitioners in film and media to showcase their work to an expanding public. Among other low-budget films produced under the company’s banner, Taar wa Zakhma (Playing the Taar, 2008) continued to explore the perimeters of female agency through the character of Ay Nabaat, a teenager from the ethnic minority of Turkmen known for their skills in rug-weaving. Nabaat is married off to a much older man, as his fifth wife, and abandoned with child on the false ground of adultery—a pulsating reality in the provinces. It is a progressively tragic story that uses weaving as a leitmotif to illustrate the protagonist’s claustrophobic entanglement in the machinations of patriarchal intrigue.

Sadat’s most well-known work and first feature-length film, Namai Ba Rahis Gomhor (A Letter to the President, 2017), is a thematic extension of the oppressed Afghan woman, but in an urban context. Unlike the aforementioned shorts, Sadat recruited professional actors for this film. Here, the protagonist is portrayed as a more overtly resilient figure; at one point, she slaps her abusive husband after he strikes her, before accidentally killing him in self-defence. Contrary to Sadat’s fears, the reciprocal slap was well-received by audiences at screenings, and seemed to function as a vicarious release against systemic injustice. In this film, the institution of the judiciary is invoked as a potential figure of redress that ultimately, however, fails against the informal, cooperative enterprise of patriarchal agents. While the narrative culminates in wrongful death by the system, it leaves traces of resilience that may have leaked from the protagonist to her children and other surviving figures of women she came in contact with. In this regard, the film registers a change unfolding in real time, and points to a quiet vigour that contaminates, and thus, poses a threat. Technically rough in the execution of her first films, Namai Ba Rahis Gomhor made visibly evident an improvement in the cinematic infrastructure, with most of the film’s budget having been spent on purchasing modern shooting and post-production equipment. The film was subsequently selected as Afghanistan’s official entry for the Oscars, indicating a shift of institutional gaze to social polemics on screen and their potential market among a diasporic audience.

Active in cultural events at school, and later, at the Herat hospital where she was a medical trainee (as mandated by the Taliban), Sadat always displayed a penchant for theatre and a concomitant fearlessness in the face of authority. Her films are imbued with a similar ferocity, where feeling triumphs technique. Sadat’s work is a departure from the Afghan cinema of the 1980s, when melodramatic spectacles coexisted with state-sponsored Communist narratives in cinema theatres; her films break tradition with both escapist impulses and propaganda. In mapping geopolitical imaginations that decolonise the visual syntax perpetrated by the international media, Sadat creates a vocabulary that confirms the female experience on the margins. Many women filmmakers have followed Sadat into filmmaking since the beginning of the century, and are currently facing the threat of dissolution with Taliban opposition to their practice and public presence. The situation is precarious once again, the ground just as unstable and the future of Afghan cinema uncertain. Like the eponymous ellipsis in Seh Noktah, the narrative hopefully continues.

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All works by Roya Sadat. Images courtesy of the artist.