Nelofer Pazira

Afghanistan, Spring 2002 — Following the fall of the taliban regime, the country faces extreme poverty. To feed his family, a father is forced to sell his 15-year-old daughter to a 65-year-old man. Refusing to accept this fate for her child, the mother, determined to give her a brighter future, arranges a marriage with a man living in Montreal. In return, she makes a solemn promise: the children born of this union will one day marry their cousins remaining in Afghanistan. Montreal, Spring 2020 — The pact resurfaces. Now well integrated into Quebec society, Zarmina refuses to let her 15-year-old daughter marry her cousin in Afghanistan. Her firm opposition triggers a tragic chain of events.

After an Afghanistan-born woman who lives in Canada receives a letter from her suicidal sister, she takes a perilous journey through Afghanistan to try to find her.

In a land beset by endless strife, nothing must get in the way of the preservation of honour - even if that means sacrificing a loved one. Mena, a young, beautiful bride-to-be, lives in a small, remote village in northern Afghanistan, a harsh landscape that still shimmers with breathtaking colours. Respecting the deeply conservative local customs, she and her fiancé, Rahmat, have little contact yet cherish a special bond.

With the Cold War about to break out in Afghanistan, young, lifelong friends Suraya and Sima must question their life choices and moral principles when they get involved in opposite sides of the conflict.

For more than forty years, British journalist Robert Fisk has reported on some of the most violent conflicts in the world, from Northern Ireland to the Middle East, always with his feet on the ground and a notebook in hand, travelling into landscapes devastated by war, ferreting out the facts and sending reports to the media he works for with the ambition of catching the interest of an audience of millions.

Christian Frei's documentary traces the tragic tale of the giant Buddhas of Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley, which stood as monumental landmarks for 1,500 years until 2001, when the Taliban declared that all non-Islamic statues in the country be destroyed. Despite international protest, the statues were blown up. Through interwoven narratives from past and present, Frei's film sheds light on the disturbing consequences of religious fanaticism.

Nelofer Pazira, the star of the movie 'Kandahar,' returns to Afghanistan to seek out her childhood friend Dyana, whose story inspired that film. Landing in Kabul 13 years after her family left Russian-occupied Afghanistan, Nelofer unravels her past and the history of her country while searching for Dyana; the epic journey takes her to Kabul, Kandahar and Masir-e-Sharif, where Dyana's uncle last had contact with her family.