What place for women in the Afghanistan of yesterday or today? What recurring violence is inflicted on them behind the walls of their homes? These are the questions posed my afghan familya remarkable Czech animated film by Michaela Pavlátová and presented last year in Annecy.
Remarkable film, because if the subject is not new, we have already seen it very well treated in Parvana Where Flee, the tone of the subject could not be more delicate and the treatment could not be more original. Thanks to the rhythm and the effects of an animation that the director of the multi-award-winning short films Reci, Reci, Reci (nominated for the Oscars in 1992) or Tram (great Cristal in Annecy in 2012), mastery at your fingertips. Thanks to the story above all, signed by her compatriot Petra Procházkova, a war reporter whose reported story is largely inspired by her experience.
Back to Prague 2001. Herra is a young Czech student who hates the vulgarity of classmates her age. She rather pinches Nazir, a handsome Afghan, whom she decides to follow in his country when he decides to return home. There, in Kabul, she will try to pose and impose her gaze as a European woman, against a backdrop of cultural and generational differences. Not easy…
Little joys and big sorrows
“For me, Petra Procházková’s novel is an extraordinary and deeply human work,” says Michaela Pavlátová in the press kit. Drawing inspiration from her own journey, she was able to transpose, with a gaze imbued with incredible empathy, the efforts of Afghan women to live free in post-Taliban Afghanistan, assume true and great love, know small joys and great sorrows that deserve our attention. We can condemn a society, whose religion and politics differ from ours, and whose behavior of individuals and groups deviates from our model, but when we are interested in the soul of human beings, to their family relationships and their daily lives, we understand their differences better. This is why the protagonist, strong and ambiguous, interests me enormously. »
We do too, and that’s why we follow with as much curiosity as fear this young woman who will find herself confronted with her family, her neighbors and all those who were not expecting her in the land of the Taliban. However, my afghan family is a universal love story, full of happy or unhappy events, in any case unexpected and all the more dramatic as we live in a country at war.