Director: Zahra Mojahed
Writer: Jawad Jafari
Running time: 15mins
Film festivals are expensive – and so they often struggle to break even, let alone make a profit. With submission fees often posing as the only dependable source of revenue that many festivals have access to, that can make granting waivers difficult.
Stories told by artists working on a shoe-string budget, or who are hit by censorship, or subjected to international sanctions, still need a platform, though. That’s why Indy Film Library’s Saturday Matinees series has returned for a sixth season.
Over this most recent run of matinees, IFL will be showcasing work from places where monetary and legal constraints have prevented the free and easy communication of their artistic or political visions.
The third film in our free-to-view programme is Zahra Mojahed’s documentary Voiceless. Mojahed, whose work readers may remember from an earlier series of Saturday Matinees, is a refugee from Afghanistan, whose concern is now to tell the stories of the women still living under Taliban rule – as well as highlighting the conditions and challenges of refugee women.
Her latest film is mostly concerned with the former – focusing on the hardships faced by one anonymous woman whose dreams of education and art have been cut short. Before the withdrawal of US forces in 2021 led to the complete collapse of the creaking infrastructure it had installed over 20 years of occupation, the faceless subject of this film had been studying music, and performing as a singer at public events.
Since the return of the Taliban to power, however, she – and many other women across the country – have been faced with a nightmarish new reality. Not only is there a totalitarian regime which threatens them externally, should they dare to pursue their aspirations in education or music, but their will is now also imposed by the people closest to them. Out of fear of what punishment may befall her or her family, the subject now says that her relatives oppose her wishes to learn, and to sing.
Mojahed’s documentary is slightly hamstrung by the circumstances of its creation. It would obviously benefit from having testimony from more than one person; in order to give us a broader view of what life is like for women in Afghanistan, and the diversity of dreams which have been smashed in the last three years. But even to have this small insight, from one brave subject willing to smuggle her story out of the country via a shaky internet connection, is commendable – as is the way that the film draws attention to what is being done to help people in this situation.
As the film draws to a conclusion, a recorded message from Dr Anna Kadzik-Bartoszewska plays. Kadzik-Bartoszewska supplies a tub-thumping speech, quoting from the Quran to also help explain that what the Taliban are doing is not based on scripture, but their own patriarchal ideology – before explaining how the world can still support women in Afghanistan. The academic is now part of the Universal Schooling Bank, an initiative aims to develop, support and provide learning materials directly to female Afghan students in various academic disciplines. The woman who has been talking to us before has been directly benefitting from this, accessing online music classes in secret.
It might have been a good idea to let viewers know how to support the Universal Schooling Bank, and projects like it. However, the important point still stands that Afghanistan is not somewhere where we should be directing impotent pity – it is a place where we can actively help to change lives; and considering the mess the West’s governments have left it in, that is the least we can do.
As with all our previous Saturday Matinees, the film will be available to view for free in full from 09:00 UK time on Saturday the 25th of January, until the end of the weekend, via our Saturday Matinees theatre page. You can give it your own score out of five there! As the film is still trying to gain access to other festivals, the page is password protected. Use the code IFLMATINEE25 to access the film.