Since the 15th of August 2021, the day the Taliban reclaimed Afghanistan, Afghan women, reduced to a life of silence, are subject to a type of apartheid unique to the world. For them, visits to the park, begging on the streets or going out without a male chaperone are forbidden. Gynaecology clinics and beauty salons have been closed. Education for girls after the age of 12 is no longer possible – in some regions after their 10th birthday.
While the prospects dwindle away, the gaps in freedom are transformed into shafts of light from which emerges Radio Begum: an educational radio station for the millions of little girls deprived of an education. This medium, made by women for women and forbidden to men, broadcasts school programmes every day that support the network of illegally operating schools in the country, of which there are around 15,000, all created in secret, housed in family rooms, cellars and caves.
Although closely monitored, radio has escaped closure in the meantime. But this balance is as fragile as it is subtle: projected through voices rather than the image, it preserves the anonymity of journalists, and their features are not exposed like those of television presenters, who are called to resign one after the other. Radio Begum is not yet breaking Taliban law, and its dozens of women journalists are resisting the long night promised by their torturers. Filmed in secret, in a dictatorship that is virtually closed to foreign cameras, this report offers unprecedented access to the only resistance that endures in Afghanistan: that of the women.