AFGHANISTAN

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25 June 2007
Afghan Women’s Struggles, Triumphs Highlighted in Documentaries

By Lauren Monsen
USINFO Staff Writer

Washington -- Although Sahar Adish and Malalai Joya never have met, these young Afghan women both have dramatic personal histories -- and they share another distinction: each is the subject of an award-winning documentary film that examines the plight of people who live in a repressive society.

Enemies of Happiness, directed by Danish filmmaker Eva Mulvad, focuses on the challenges faced by Joya, a 28-year-old reformer and women’s rights advocate elected to the Afghan parliament in 2005. The documentary received a standing ovation when it was screened recently at the American Film Institute’s Silverdocs International Documentary Film Festival in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington. (See related article.)

Joya, an outspoken critic of Afghanistan’s warlords, has endured threats and assassination attempts. She has denounced Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance military/political organization as “just as bad as the Taliban: anti-democracy, anti-human rights, anti-women’s rights.” In the film, Joya is shown on the run, moving from one safe house to another, in fear for her life. The title Enemies of Happiness is a reference to her description of the Northern Alliance as “criminal warlords [who] are destroying Afghanistan” and “destroying the happiness” of the Afghan people.

In May, the Afghan parliament voted to suspend Joya from her seat, citing a rule forbidding members to criticize each other. Several Afghan legal scholars denounced the move, saying the parliament had no legal authority to remove Joya.

Enemies of Happiness won the Silver Wolf Award at the 2006 International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the World Cinema Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

The short film Sahar: Before the Sun (Sahar means “dawn”) opens with a sequence of luminous family photographs from the days when Adish lived with her family in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, before the Taliban came to power. Adish’s mother was a teacher trained in chemistry and biology, and her father was a geologist; they repeatedly stressed to their children the importance of education. The film shows how everything changed in 1996, when religious fundamentalists took control of Afghanistan. Women were not allowed to hold jobs and girls were forbidden to go to school. Adish’s mother began secretly teaching her daughter, then 9, at home, and soon other girls were joining them for lessons.

In 1998, the authorities learned about the classes, and Adish’s father was seized and beaten. He was released several days later and was warned that he and his wife would be executed if the lessons continued. That night, the family fled to neighboring Pakistan, where they remained for a few years. They applied to come to the United States as refugees, so the children could pursue their educations. In 2002, the International Rescue Committee relocated the family to Charlottesville, Virginia.

In an interview with USINFO, Adish explained that because she knew English, she was able to make a fairly seamless transition to her school in Charlottesville. She was introduced to filmmaking when Listen Up!, a nonprofit youth media organization, began distributing cameras to secondary school students and encouraging them to make brief documentary films about their lives.

Adish’s film was included among nine short works by young people from around the world, all linked by the theme “fear and security.” Those nine works, collectively titled Beyond Borders: Personal Stories from a Small Planet, were shown at the Chicago Film Festival and at New York’s Woodstock Film Festival in 2006, and they won U.S. broadcasting’s highest honor, the George Foster Peabody Award, in 2007.

“My film got a lot of recognition,” Adish said. “It was aired at the Youth Film Festival in Israel in 2006,” independently of the other works that make up Beyond Borders. She was invited to attend a screening in Israel, but was unable to because it would have interfered with her studies. Those studies are the whole point, she said. “The main message in my movie is about how important education is. When I was in high school making this film [at age 16], I saw a lot of kids who take education for granted. That was interesting to me.”

Today, at 19, Adish is a student at the University of Virginia and plans to attend medical school. One brother recently graduated from the University of Virginia, and another lives in Canada. The family is in the process of obtaining U.S. citizenship.

Coming from a war-torn country where education was by no means assured, Adish said she is acutely aware of how much her future depends on her schooling. “My next goal is to get into medical school,” she said, “and perhaps stay involved in filmmaking, too, if possible.”

When she becomes a doctor, Adish said, she hopes “to go back and forth between Afghanistan and the U.S.,” providing medical care to needy Afghans while maintaining a regular practice in the United States.

For more information about Enemies of Happiness, see Joya’s Web site. To learn more about Adish and watch a clip from Sahar: Before the Sun, visit the Listen Up! Web site.

(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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