Afghan Director Shahrbanoo Sadat on Her Academy Museum Retro and Why ‘Comedy Is Perfect’

Nick Vivarelli
·4 min read
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Last August, Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat managed to escape from Kabul with part of her family as Taliban fighters took over the city while U.S. forces withdrew.

Now, her “Weekend With…Shahrbanoo Sadat” event at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, starting on Saturday Jan. 29, will give U.S. audiences an opportunity to dive deep into the bold young filmmaker’s three works: “Not at Home,” “Wolf and Sheep,” and “The Orphanage.”

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“With everything that’s happened in Afghanistan, I think it’s important, especially for American audiences, to take a look at my films,” Sadat tells Variety, in order to see her country “from a different point of view.”

“My cinema focusses on the everyday life of people,” the director notes.

“Not at Home,” the first work in the series, is a hybrid documentary/feature film that Sadat co-directed with her German producing partner Katja Adomeit. It’s about changing dynamics in a family of Afghan refugees who return to Afghanistan, just like her own family did after living in Iran.

For health reasons, when the Sadat family relocated from Tehran to an Afghan village, her father was unable to work. “Suddenly the power dynamic changed completely,” she says, because the women were the breadwinners. “I was interested in that,” she notes. Thanks to her fortuitous encounter with Admeit, they made what she calls an “experimental” film about it.

Sadat’s first full-fledged feature, “Wolf and Sheep,” was developed with the Cannes Cinefondation Residence in 2010. She was only 20 years old at the time, making her the youngest-ever director selected for the program. The film, set in a remote mountain village where rural reality co-exists with magical-realist folklore and a group of shepherd children live in awe of the legendary Kashmir wolf, went on to win the main award at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight section in 2016. It’s the first installment of a pentalogy based on the unpublished personal diary of actor and writer Anwar Hashimi, who collaborated with her on the screenplay.

“The Orphanage,” which is Sadat’s Bollywood-inspired follow-up, continues her collaboration with actor Qodratollah Qadiri, who resumes his role in “Wolf and Sheep” as Qodrat, now 15 and peddling black-market cinema tickets in 1989 Kabul. He is caught by police and placed in a Soviet-run orphanage just as the U.S.S.R. is crumbling, which prompted the Taliban takeover.

“For a lot of Afghan people, especially in my generation, history started with the Taliban in the ’90s,” Sadat says. “They don’t know anything about before that. And I think this is one of the main reasons why Afghanistan is in this condition today.”

Sadat was developing the third installment of the pentalogy, a romantic comedy titled “Kabul Jan,” when, in August 2021, she had to escape Taliban-controlled Afghanistan within days of the ill-fated American withdrawal.

“Kabul Jan” is set in recent years, prior to the U.S. pullout, at a Kabul TV station. “It’s a love story between a female camera operator and a TV news reporter,” Sadat says. At first the young woman was shooting Afghan weddings, but then she manages to get a job at the TV station, where she soon realizes there is a pecking order between camera operators who shoot cooking shows and those who cover the news. “If you cover a terrorist attack, or something like that, you are valued, you get a higher salary,” Sadat points out.

“So I’m trying to make a film about love, but also show how the Afghan press worked during the past twenty years,” she says.

Sadat is continuing to work on “Kabul Jan” from Hamburg, where she now lives. She hopes that with this film, she will have a chance to “turn my memories into film before I forget them.”

The plan is to scout locations for “Kabul Jan” this summer and then shoot the film in 2023.

Meanwhile, Sadat keeps in constant contact with the relatives she had to leave behind in Afghanistan, where there is total chaos and “people are starving and nobody is going to university anymore.” Yet, even though the situation in her country is getting worse, Sadat still feels that the story of Afghanistan cannot be told as dark drama. “Comedy is perfect,” says Sadat, “because with one eye you are crying and with the other eye you are laughing, and tragedy and comedy go in parallel.”

Then she adds, “I want to create a bigger audience for Afghan films. But I don’t want to make people cry. I actually want to do the opposite. I want to make them laugh, to get them involved in the topic.”

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