Dir: Sahra Mani, US 2023 90′
Breaking news from Afghanistan: the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice has decreed that women’s voices are now considered awrah, a term connoting nakedness or ‘that which must be covered.’
Female voices may no longer be heard in public: particularly by other women, who must refrain not only from singing songs, but even from reciting the Quran in the presence of females. “When an adult female prays and another female passes by, she must not pray loudly enough for them to hear,” the Minister, Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, declared. “And how could they be allowed to sing if they are not even permitted to hear each other’s voices while praying?”
In some areas of the Western press this immemorial edict, only now unearthed by the diligent scholarship of the Taliban (whose name, after all, translates as “students, or seekers of knowledge”), is being called “bizarre” and “absurd”. But it’s perfectly rational from the Taliban’s perspective. For the twenty years in which they were out of office, they had to watch as a generation of Afghan women benefited from a reasonable measure of education and freedom, and aspired to an entirely new range of goals.
The new declaration of awrah is very obviously calculated to mute this group and prevent them from spreading their knowledge to younger cohorts (one suspects that speaking, rather than singing, is the real issue here). A curtain must be drawn across their experience, and the possibility of different forms of life and thought expunged from the record.
Bread and Roses focuses on three women whom the Taliban would very much like to silence. They are representatives of those whose condition improved before the American military pulled out in 2021 (a decision made during the Trump administration, but enacted by Joe Biden) and who are now fighting against the shameless war of revenge being waged by the Taliban against half the country’s population.
Indomitable but kindly activist Taranom Seyedi is forced to leave the country and eke out life in a meagrely appointed safe house in Pakistan: cold, penniless, lacking proper washing facilities, and surrounded by hostile wild animals. “We are the future presidents of our country,” she reminds the women with whom she shares the house. One day this may come true, but right now it seems a far-off dream.
The gentle and reserved Sharifa Movahidzadeh previously worked as a government employee, but is now reduced to the boring pursuit of sewing garments to pass the time and staring out across the cityscape of Kabul from the roof of her family house, where she is mostly confined.
The term “bright spark” could have been specifically coined for the intensely likeable Zahra Mohammadi, who makes wearing colourful clothing and perfume part of her rebellion. Despite coming from a conservative background, she qualified as a dentist and started her own practice, but now the Taliban has closed down all female-run enterprises. Zahra begins to organise activists on her former premises; she is arrested and sees women she knows tortured so badly that they are virtually unrecognisable.
The courage and dignity of all three women is outstanding, but it begs the question – why should anyone be obliged to lead lives that require such massive reserves of fortitude? Why can’t they simply… live, like the rest of us?
The film shows women protesting against the closing of schools, and water cannons and tear gas being used against them. it shows armed Taliban fighters brutalising defenceless demonstrators, and threatening to kill a woman who has been arrested for continuing to speak. If the moral imbecility of all this isn’t enough, a few simple statistics illustrate the insanity of the regime on a merely practical level.
Afghanistan has the highest fertility rate in Asia, with 4.5 children being born on average to every Afghan woman. The current population (around 35 million) is estimated to reach 47 million by 2025, and 76 million by 2050.
The country’s Gross Domestic Product declined by more than a quarter in 2021 and 2022, and there’s no sign of any significant recovery on the horizon.
Meanwhile the rate of participation in the labour force among males is 69.1%.
Among females, it’s 4.8%.
But it would be wrong to think that disaster is inevitable, or even that the Taliban are the natural rulers of Afghanistan: a highly complex nation riven with tribal and ethnic divisions. Their first period of control lasted just five years, and one can only hope that their second will not only be shorter, but also their last. Bread and Roses is an important document, and it should be seen.
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In selected UK cinemas | Apple+ TV | CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | GOLDEN EYE 2023