News

This year’s TIFF essentially confirmed what 2024 is all about in Asian cinema terms: co-productions, Chinese cinema, Asean genre films and a Japanese industry that has gotten back to the top due to its ever present stability. The program was quite interesting in general, as it combined genre with art house in an almost equal ratio, in a rather unusual move for a festival, where the selection tends to linger towars the latter. The result definitely worked, particularly in terms of diversity, with the program including from experimental titles to intense crowdpleasers and everything between. “She Taught Me Serendipity“, “Pavane for an Infant“, and “Harbor Lights” are among the highlights of a selection that includes a number of gems.

Check our full coverage in the articles below

1. Film Review: Sima’s Song (2024) by Roya Sadat © Ton Peters

“Sima’s Song” is an excellent film that manages to highlight the issues Afghanistan faces...

Following the retaking of Afghanistan by the Taliban, in another tragic chapter in the country’s history, Roya Sadat and her husband and frequent collaborator Aziz Deildar, found themselves escaping the country, leaving almost everything behind, and eventually finding solace in the US. As such, it was quite a pleasure to learn that they managed to shoot another movie, with “Sima’s Song” premiering in Tokyo International Film Festival.

Sima’s Song is screening at Tokyo International Film Festival

The story is set in Afghanistan in 1978, during the transition to socialism, when the Russian influence in the country was quite intense, but also something else was starting to move within the government circles. Two girls, rich idealist and communist Suraya and poor Muslim Soraya manage to retain a loving friendship in the midst of the following invasion by the Soviet Union and the rise of an anti-Soviet armed group. While the former insists on women’s freedom,...

On the occasion of their film “Sima’s Song” screening at Tokyo International Film Festival, director Roya Sadat and actor and script writer Aziz Deildar talk about the path that led them from escaping Afghanistan to shooting a film in Greece, placing the story in the 70s, the place of women throughout the deceads in the country, the casting of the movie and their future projects...

Eminent Afghanistan filmmaker Roya Sadat had quite the journey while filming “The Sharp Edge of Peace,” which has its world premiere at Hot Docs.

The film follows four women leaders, Fatima Gailani, Fawzia Koofi, Habiba Sarabi and Sharifa Zumati, who risk their lives and receive death threats, as they find a way to sit at the negotiating table with the Taliban to ensure justice for women.

Sadat, whose “A Letter to the President” was Afghanistan’s contender in Oscar’s international category in 2017, was a teenage schoolgirl when the Taliban returned to power for the first time this century, a period she describes as a “terrifying nightmare of five dark and hopeless years.”

“The women of Afghanistan have an unwritten history of struggle. There’s no mention of their names in the pages of political history; this lost history has been standing up for its rights for years. And this time,...

Production is set to begin in Greece in November.

Afghan-Canadian actress Mozhdah Jamalzadah is to star in Roya Sadat’s Sima’s Song, which is set to be showcased at the Asian Project Market (Apm) in Busan.

The dramatic thriller is a Spain-Netherlands-France co-production and is set to begin production in Greece in six weeks. It marks the second feature from Sadat, Afghanistan’s leading female director, whose drama A Letter To The President was her country’s submission to the Oscars in 2018.

Set in Kabul, Sima’s Song will follow two friends on opposite ends of the social and...

The first film by a woman after the fall of the Taliban regime, and Afghanistan’s submission for the foreign-language Oscar, is an extremely pointy production that deals with the inconsistencies of the Afghan legal system, which lingers between Islamic, statutory and customary rules, as it presents the issues women face in the country, through a genuinely feminist view.

A Letter to the President screened at Vesoul International Film Festival of Asian cinema

The film revolves around Soraya, a mother of two, who tries to balance her career as the head of the Kabul Crime Division and her life as the wife of a very rich but on the verge of alcoholism husband, who, additionally, is dominated by his gangster father. The already crumbling balance ends when Soraya decides to save a woman who is being accused of adultery and is actually sentenced to death by the village elders, and...

The first film by a woman after the fall of the Taliban regime, and Afghanistan’s submission for the foreign-language Oscar, is an extremely pointy production that deals with the inconsistencies of the Afghan legal system, which lingers between Islamic, statutory and customary rules, as it presents the issues women face in the country, through a genuinely feminist view.

“A Letter to a President” is screening at Aperture: Asia & Pacific Film Festival

The film revolves around Soraya, a mother of two, who tries to balance her career as the head of the Kabul Crime Division and her life as the wife of a very rich but on the verge of alcoholism husband, who, additionally, is dominated by his gangster father. The already crumbling balance ends when Soraya decides to save a woman who is being accused of adultery and is actually sentenced to death by the village elders, and in...

W arm Bread and The Nipple’s Circle is one of the twenty-three films selected for the co- production market of Film Bazaar 2013. We spoke to the director Roya Sadat:

Roya Sadat

Tell us about your project. What language will it be in?

This project began in 2009, and was select for the Ppp (Pusan Promotion Plan) film market at Pusan International Film Festival, South Korea. It received a cash award from the Gutenberg film market for development of the script.

The film is about a 25 year-old brave, diligent Pashtoon girl, Uzra, in love with a Pakistani boy, Shamshad. A girl, she worked as diligently as any hardworking rural man, while her brother studied in the city nearby. Quchi, a violent 45 year old parliamentarian, had been imposing on Uzra to marry him, leading her to plan an escape with Shamshad. She reached the destination, but Shamshad was captured and held...