Women in Afghan cinema

For most of the history of Afghan cinema, women were rare on screen and almost absent behind it. Acting carried a social stigma, and under the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 both cinema and women's public life were banned. The years after 2001 opened a narrow window. The women who stepped through it made some of the most important Afghan films of the century, often at great personal risk.

Marina Golbahari: from the streets of Kabul to Cannes

Marina Golbahari was born in Kabul in 1992. When Siddiq Barmak was casting Osama, he found her begging on the city's streets and gave her the lead role, a girl forced to live as a boy under the Taliban. Her performance carried the film to Cannes and the Golden Globes, and won her the Best Young Actor award at the Molodist festival in Kyiv in 2003 and Best Actress at Cinemanila.

She kept working. She appeared in a Dari production of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost staged in 2005, whose story was later told in the book Shakespeare in Kabul (2012), and she returned to Barmak's cast in Opium War (2008).

The role she played, a girl forced to live as a boy, has had a long afterlife on screen. We follow it from Osama to Marvel's Ms. Marvel in Secret identities: Osama, Dust, Ms. Marvel and the Muslim girls who had to hide.

Visibility came at a cost. In 2012 she was photographed at a film festival in South Korea without her head covered. The images led to death threats at home. She and her husband, Noorullah Azizi, who works in Afghan film and television, left for France, where they have lived in exile.

Saba Sahar: the first woman to direct

Saba Sahar was born in Kabul on 28 August 1975 and spent years in exile in Moscow, Tehran and Peshawar before returning home. She is widely described as Afghanistan's first female film director and producer. Her debut as a director, The Law (2004), was a popular success. She also appears in Passing the Rainbow (2008), a film by Sandra Schäfer and Elfe Brandenburger that was shown in an art installation at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London in 2010.

Sahar is also one of the country's best known actors and an outspoken advocate for women's rights. On 25 August 2020 she was shot in the stomach by an unknown gunman while travelling to work in Kabul. She survived after emergency surgery.

Roya Sadat: stories of injustice

Roya Sadat was born in Herat in 1983, during the Soviet occupation, and studied law and political science at Herat University. She is often called the first woman director of Afghan cinema after the Taliban. Her first feature, Three Dots, won six awards, including best film and best director.

In 2003 she and her sister, the documentary filmmaker Alka Sadat, founded Roya Film House, which has produced more than 30 documentaries, features and television series. Her feature A Letter to the President (2017) was Afghanistan's submission to the Academy Awards. Since 2013 she has also led the International Women's Film Festival in Afghanistan. Her work returns again and again to the injustices faced by Afghan women.

Sahraa Karimi: the first woman to lead Afghan Film

Sahraa Karimi was born in Tehran on 20 April 1981 to Afghan refugee parents. She earned a doctorate in fiction film directing and screenwriting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia, and made her name with documentaries such as Afghan Women Behind the Wheel, which won around 20 international awards.

In 2019 she became the first woman to chair Afghan Film, the institution that Barmak had led before her. The same year her feature Hava, Maryam, Ayesha premiered in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival. When the Taliban returned in August 2021, Karimi was evacuated from Kabul to Kyiv with eleven others. She later settled in Italy and in 2022 began teaching at the national film school in Rome.

Shahrbanoo Sadat: two films at Cannes

Shahrbanoo Sadat's first feature, Wolf and Sheep (2016), a story of shepherd children in a remote Afghan village, won the Art Cinema Award, the top prize of the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. Her second feature, The Orphanage (2019), also premiered in the Directors' Fortnight.

After 2021

The return of the Taliban in August 2021 closed the window that had opened twenty years earlier. Women were pushed out of most public life, and cinema lost its official support; in 2025 the Taliban administration dissolved Afghan Film, according to Afghan media reports. Many of the women on this page now work in exile, telling Afghan stories from Europe and elsewhere. Their films remain the best record of what Afghan women saw, suffered and imagined in those two decades.