Le monde en face - Afghanes

Sofia and Nigina. They’re Afghans, beautiful, proud, best friends, despite themselves and without knowing it - icons of Kabul’s idle youth. Behind the curtains of their beauty salon, the exterior of which has been ransacked by the Taliban, they support a small team and a dream: to protect their last space of freedom. Their salon is situated in central Kabul. Around twenty employees work there, seven days a week. It’s a sanctuary for women: a place where men do not enter. We began filming the day after the Taliban came to power on August 15, 2021. For a year and a half, as the extremists impose new laws on Afghans, especially women, we follow the two friends in their beauty salon and across the Afghan capital: in a park where they are the only ones who still dare to show their faces; on the hilltops where they learn to drive in secret… And then, on the road to exile. The repression becomes too suffocating, too violent. The young women’s quest for lightness becomes a plan of escape…

Almost five years after their return to power, a new era has dawned under the yoke of the Taliban, an inflexible fundamentalist regime. Under their rule, the former republic has disappeared, replaced by an ultra-rigid power structure closed off from the rest of the world and the foreign press. An "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan", largely unrecognised, even by Islamic theocracies. After four shoots, mainly carried out outside the official framework, "The Taliban Country" offers a glimpse into the heart of this new Afghan reality. Through the eyes of the men and women facing these upheavals, the film paints a portrait of a paradoxical and radical system. It offers an in-depth look at the workings of a state characterised by extreme rigour, unparalleled in the contemporary world.

Since 15 August 2021, the day the Taliban took power, women in Afghanistan have been suffering from a gender apartheid that is unique in the world. Only Radio Begum gives them hope: Radio Begum broadcasts school radio programmes by women for women, albeit under strict Taliban control.

By immersing themselves in a Taliban village, and after gaining very rare access to major institutions, the directors shed a disturbing light on today's Taliban society, and on the workings of this ultra-conservative parallel state. whose leaders have just symbolically moved into the presidential palace, to assert a stranglehold that foreshadows the Afghanistan of tomorrow.