Bread & Roses review – Afghan women reveal crushing reality of Taliban rule
Made under dangerous conditions, this documentary charts how the lives of three women were turned upside down by Afghanistan’s overthrow in 2021
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”.
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