We delve into the hell that has become the daily lives of women in Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. The Taliban have made Afghanistan the worst country in the world for women. Women are now banned from high school and university, excluded from most jobs, forbidden to travel alone, wear make-up, show their faces or even to make their voices heard in public.
To show what life is like in this country, in the media’s blind spot, we take an ambitious twofold approach. Thanks to an extremely rare visa, we were able to film in Afghanistan to ostensibly promote Afghan tourist sites, like the ruins of the famous Buddas of Bamyan, dynamited by the Taliban themselves 20 years earlier and now promoted as a tourist attraction. But this was just a cover to give us the necessary access to document and share the stories of this country where women are nowhere to be seen.
At the same time, secret footage shows the hidden face of Afghanistan: economic misery, rising depression and suicides. Several women across the country courageously agreed to film their daily lives on their cell phones, the last bastion of freedom. By replacing their faces with AI generated images, we protect their identities, while retaining their humanity.
In this documentary, the interweaving of social propaganda and real, immersive footage of Afghan’s women’s daily lives reveals the reality of Afghanistan’s gender apartheid, which is unlike anywhere else in the world.