By Nicole Winfield & Trisha Thomas
VENICE, Italy (AP) --Afghan female filmmakers who fled the Taliban begged the world to not forget the Afghan people and to support its artists, warning Saturday that a country without culture will eventually lose its identity.
The Venice Film Festival organized a panel discussion Saturday to give a platform to Sahraa Karimi, the first female president of the Afghan Film Organization, and documentary filmmaker Sahra Mani, who is presenting a project at the Venice film market fair.
Karimi choked up while telling reporters about her own escape — in which she had just hours to decide whether to stay or leave — and all that had been lost after the Taliban completed their takeover of the country.
She cited numerous films that were in pre-and-post production, filmmaking workshops that had been organized, insurance policies negotiated for equipment, and said that Afghan directors were increasingly being welcomed at international film festivals. Karimi herself had presented a film at the Venice Film Festival in 2019.
"It was our dream to change the narrative of Afghanistan, because we were tired of those cliches about Afghanistan," she said. "We wanted to produce films, movies and to tell our stories from different angles, from different perspectives, to show the beauty of our country."
But she said all of that has been lost, and that the country's burgeoning filmmaking community had either fled or gone into hiding, with its archives now under Taliban control.
"Imagine a country without artists, a country without filmmakers, how can they defend its identity?" Karimi asked. "Maybe we are not politically ambassadors, but we are ambassadors for our stories, we are ambassadors of our identity.
"We are those people that represent our identity to the world, through our films, through our music, through our creative works. But we are now homeless."
She said she decided to flee on the morning of Aug. 15, with just a few hours to make "the most difficult decision of your life: stay or leave."
She said many of Afghanistan's youngest and brightest left too, but said thousands more promising filmmakers couldn't get out and are now erasing their social media presence for their own safety and going underground.
Mani said even under the corrupt rule of Afghanistan's ousted government, she had remained despite the daily security risks and everyday hassles — electricity cuts, internet outages — because she wanted to rebuild the country and restart its cultural life.
"We stayed. We were optimists," she said. But with the Taliban takeover, "it means we don't have anything to fight for. We lost everything."
Local school staple “Lost on a Mountain in Maine” from 1939 hits the big screen nationwide
Most Maine schoolchildren know about the boy lost for more than a week in 1939 after climbing the state's tallest mountain. Now the rest of the U.S. is getting in on the story.
Opening in 650 movie theaters on Friday, "Lost on a Mountain in Maine" tells the harrowing tale of 12-year-old Donn Fendler, who spent nine days on Mount Katahdin and the surrounding wilderness before being rescued. The gripping story of survival commanded the nation's attention in the days before World War II and the boy's grit earned an award from the president.
For decades, Fendler and Joseph B. Egan's book, published the same year as the rescue, has been required reading in many Maine classrooms, like third-grade teacher Kimberly Nielsen's.
"I love that the overarching theme is that Donn never gave up. He just never quits. He goes and goes," said Nielsen, a teacher at Crooked River Elementary School in Casco, who also read the book multiple times with her own kids.
Separated from his hiking group in bad weather atop Mount Katahdin, Fendler used techniques learned as a Boy Scout to survive. He made his way through the woods to the east branch of the Penobscot River, where he was found more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) from where he started. Bruised and cut, starved and without pants or shoes, he survived nine days by eating berries and lost 15 pounds (7 kilograms).
The boy's peril sparked a massive search and was the focus of newspaper headlines and nightly radio broadcasts. Hundreds of volunteers streamed into the region to help.
The movie builds on the children's book, as told by Fendler to Egan, by drawing upon additional interviews and archival footage to reinforce the importance of family, faith and community during difficult times,... Read More