We Afghan Women

Eight Afghan women: a photographer, a director, a mayor, a sportswoman, a businesswoman, a teacher and two activists talk about their work over the last twenty years, about the arrival of the Taliban, and of escape and resistance. We meet up with them in the countries they found refuge in after their escape - Italy, Switzerland, France and Germany. Their stories and the footage shot by some of them have become a documentary also using animated drawings and private archives. A story of courage, freedom and the desire for equal rights.

A photographer, a journalist, a filmmaker, an activist, a mayor, a sportswoman, an entrepreneur, an educator. Normal professions that have become dangerous and forbidden in the country where they lived: Afghanistan. Seven Afghan women are the protagonists of this documentary: they and the images (never-before-seen photos and videos) they took during the years they spent in Afghanistan. We travelled all over Europe (Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany) to meet them and they told us about the life they have lived during these 20 years of freedom from Sharia law. They were able to study, travel, work, listen to music. To have a dream and follow it. To have a vision beyond the burka and to pursue it. To have a place to live and breathe. A path that is still for a privileged few, but which, with the opening of schools to girls, was becoming a long, slow road to gender equality and equal rights. But this conquest of normality in their country would have been their undoing if they had not escaped in time. In those hellish days, from Kabul airport, in front of the whole world. Under the Taliban regime, women are not allowed to do any of their jobs. Like a pinball machine gone mad, these seven women have been forced to flee, finding temporary homes all over the world, in countries and cities that have welcomed them. We met them to get to know them, to hear their stories, the stories of their mothers and grandmothers, so that they, and the more than 14 million Afghan women and girls, are not forgotten when the news broadcasts end. In addition to their personal stories, we discussed with them some of the larger issues in the history of their country.