Sahra Mani's Bread and Roses, on AppleTV+, offers three points of view on the human-rights crisis women face in Afghanistan after the Taliban resumed control in 2021.Apple TV+
The new AppleTV+ documentary Bread and Roses is anger and anguish in film form. It follows three women who, in the months after the Taliban entered Kabul in August, 2021, swiftly lost their most basic human rights: to education, employment and autonomy, even to walk alone in the street. You, too, will be quivering with rage by the end.
When Kabul collapsed, Afghan director Sahra Mani was in Cologne, Germany, at the LaDOC women’s filmmaking collective, screening her documentary A Thousand Girls Like Me (2019), about an Afghan sexual-abuse survivor. “I didn’t know I wouldn’t be able to go back home to Afghanistan and open the door I’d closed a few days before,” she said during a recent video interview. “I still haven’t opened that door.” She stayed in Europe, and women in Kabul began sending her real-time footage from their phone cameras – “modern, educated women, aware of their rights, who wanted to do something,” she continues. “They’re really brave.”
At the same time, the actor Jennifer Lawrence, an outspoken promoter of women’s rights, had a “strong, emotional reaction” to what she was seeing on the news, her producing partner, Justine Ciarrocchi, said in a separate interview. “The mandate of our company” – called Excellent Cadaver – “is to tell dynamic stories with bold characters. This one was born out of urgency. The women’s loss of freedom was unfathomable to Jen.” Ciarrocchi tracked down Mani and offered to raise funds to turn the women’s footage into a film. Later in the process, the terrorism survivor Malala Yousafzai, whose non-profit Malala Fund advocates for the recognition of gender apartheid as a crime against humanity, signed on as an executive producer.
Producer Justine Ciarrocchi, Zahra, producer Jennifer Lawrence and director Sahra Mani attend the Bread And Roses photocall at the 76th annual Cannes film festival at Palais des Festivals on May 21, 2023 in Cannes, France.Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
“I know how terrifying your daily life becomes under terrorism,” Yousafzai wrote in an e-mail. “You don’t know when it will end. You have nothing left to lose, so you risk your life to speak out with the hopes that someone will hear your story. I believe that storytelling is the soul of activism.”
“I also want viewers to know that what they see in the film is not normal,” Yousafzai continues. “Sometimes when people talk about Afghanistan, they assume that this is how life is there. But Before the Taliban resumed control, women were in positions of power. They were government officials and judges. Afghanistan is the only country in the world today that bans girls’ secondary education.”
Gradually, Mani narrowed her focus to three women: Sharifa, a former government employee, whose family consigns her to a tedious existence, virtually imprisoned in her home; Zahra, a dentist who begins organizing activists after her successful practice is shuttered; and Taranom, an activist who flees to Pakistan and reports on refugee life. (Eventually, the filmmakers helped these three and a few others relocate for their safety; none currently live in Afghanistan.)
“It’s three different points of view on the crisis,” Ciarrocchi says. “The common denominator is their resilience and their spirit. I’ve watched this material for hours over many months, and it never doesn’t cut me straight to the bone, ever. To exist under those circumstances, and still be able to make jokes, to have hope, is unbelievable and inspiring.”
Mani began instructing her fledgling cinematographers on how and what to shoot: “Your footage is good, but it’s shaking or dark,” she told them. “Can you leave the mobile in front of a window, so I can see you? When you’re shooting your table, shoot whatever is on it – fork, food, bread, what else? I need the details. I didn’t want them to copy reportage on TV; I wanted them to be themselves.”
She also hired a local cameraman and camerawoman to shoot more formal images. “I told them, go to these women in the morning and leave in the evening,” she says. “You have to live inside your subjects, become part of their families, to capture these intimate moments. They said, ‘There’s nothing to do, they can’t do anything!’” Which was her point.
Of course, there were more than enough harrowing scenes to film: A journalist is beaten by Taliban members. Women protestors are water-cannoned and tear-gassed. A taxi driver refuses to take a woman without a chaperone. A passing driver menaces a picketing woman, saying, “Get into this car or I’ll kill you.”
“Go on!” she shouts back. “You’re desperate for power over us, you might as well kill me.”
Throughout the two years of filming and editing, turbulence in neighbouring countries forced postproduction facilities to relocate several times, and the internet – the lifeline between filmmakers and subjects – kept fizzling out at crucial moments. “I worry if I mention this [in interviews] the Taliban will cut it,” Mani says. “I don’t know what to say that won’t damage women further.”
Worst of all, for a few nail-biting days, “most of my protagonists disappeared,” she goes on. “Taliban arrested them. Fortunately, Taliban forced a fake confession on TV and released them. But Zahra was beaten, and there were so many women not in my film who were arrested and never came home. It’s been three years, and their children and loved ones are still waiting for them. Many women have been shot to death. The situation gets worse every day, but our world is too busy. Afghanistan is being forgotten.”
So how can viewers turn anger into action? “This documentary should serve as a siren call for global leaders and policy-makers,” Malala writes. “Our leaders, especially those in influential positions at the United Nations, should watch it and feel compelled to recognize and act against the system of gender apartheid imposed by the Taliban.” She also suggests viewers seek out and support their local Afghan refugee communities, as well as Afghan activists who are providing alternative education programs to women and girls both in and out of the country. The film’s end credits will include a handful of organizations to which viewers can donate, still incomplete at press time.
The world needs to pay attention for its own sake, Mani says: “The Taliban are not just a group of men against women – they are international terrorists with plans for the future. They take education from women and put them in prison because they are scared of women. They know that when women are educated, when they are powerful mothers, they will not let their children become Taliban soldiers.”
“This film is not about a feminist movement,” she sums up. “It’s about the security of our world.”
Sign up for The Globe’s arts and lifestyle newsletters for more news, columns and advice in your inbox.