Made under dangerous conditions, this documentary charts how the lives of three women were turned upside down by Afghanistan’s overthrow in 2021

Afghan film-maker Sahra Mani, creator of the rape-survivor documentary A Thousand Girls Like Me from 2018, brought her camera to Kabul to chronicle Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban in 2021 following America’s withdrawal. A strange mixture of amnesia and cross-party reticence means that this issue has not in fact featured much in postmortem discussions of the Biden/Harris administration. Women’s rights were immediately crushed by theocratic misogynists, and Afghanistan’s women cannot have been reassured by the response from the western anti-war left, notably the now notorious, breezily unconcerned tweet from Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis: “Hang in there sisters!”

Mani’s film shows three Afghan women hanging in there with zero help from anyone but themselves and, like Hasan Oswald’s film Mediha (exec-produced by Emma Thompson...