Life in the Taliban’s Afghanistan
Since the Taliban’s took control of Afghanistan in 2021, women’s rights have been in grave danger. In the film Life in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, reporter Isobel Yeung deepens into the current state of women’s rights in the country and shows how their lives are under the Taliban’s rules. In Afghanistan, women are deprived of going to work, studying and even going outside home. Streets, parks, schools and even courthouses are now dominated by men, as the Taliban don’t believe in gender parity and equality before the law. Under this situation, there are lots of cases of sexual, physical and psychological abuse that are remaining hidden in the country, benefiting the power of the man over the voice of the women. Even if the Taliban assure that women’s rights are being defended in the country, they have established a discriminatory government in which women are being removed from the public life, marginalized and mistreated. In addition, Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian crisis in which medical care is scarce and some people don’t even have access to it. This represents a critical situation in which many children have problems for surviving and, if they do, they will have a black future ahead. Even more if you’re born as a girl.
The movie Life in the Taliban’s Afghanistan was screened Oct 8 at Salt Galata in the frame of the Kite Runner project taking place in Istanbul between July and December 2022.
The Kite Runner Project
The Kite Runner project is an initiative of the Istanbul based association Diyalog which started in August 2022, in cooperation with the International Media Support (IMS) based in Denmark.
Inspired by the novel Kite Runner by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini this project aims to provide workshop opportunities, organise social events and network building activities for Afghans with journalistic and media background living in Turkey. Some of the gatherings are just online meetings for those who want to attend the activities from Afghanistan or any other part of the globe.
Among the activities we can find language courses, film screenings, legal advice and media workshops, available for Afghans with and without journalistic experience. There are also specific working groups for female journalists. The condition for the participants to attend the events is to have interest and enthusiasm about video, filmmaking and journalism, and to show passion for social justice, equity and human rights. The objective of the Kite Runner project is to encourage the participants to use their skills for creating movies about their environment, their own journey, community life or conflict situations. Everything to serve as social gathering, networking booster and a platform to professionalizing media skills while promoting intercultural understanding between borders.
Afghanistan has been qualified as “the worst place to be a woman”. With the work of the Kite Runner project and the involvement of the public activities organised in Istanbul, we will get to spread and raise awareness about the significant problematic in Afghanistan and denounce the hard violation of human rights in the country.