A secretly shot Finnish documentary about women in Afghanistan won an award in Denmark

Finnish The Secret Reading Club of Kabul -documentary was awarded on Friday in Copenhagen at the CPH:DOX documentary festival.

The documentary won the NORDIC:DOX prize, i.e. the main prize of the Nordic racing series.

Directors Elina Hirvonen and Shakiba Adil describe in the documentary the plight of Afghan women under the rule of the Taliban. Reading in an extremely closed country gives women strength. The entire documentary was shot secretly.

Adil’s friend started a secret book club for young women in Kabul. The first book was chosen at Adil’s suggestion Diary of a young girlwhere the Jew Anne Frank tells about hiding from the Nazis 1942–1944.

In the documentary women compare the burqa worn by women to the Star of David, which the Jews wore on their clothes at the behest of the Nazis. Reading, on the other hand, is a lantern in the dark for them, one of the main characters told the authors.

Three members of the book club Rakshana, Two and Mahtab have filmed the documentary with their phones. The last pictures are from last November. The people’s faces have been cropped out of the pictures so that the Taliban cannot recognize them.

“Of course, the names are not correct. We had to constantly think about what could be shown for safety reasons. Many great pictures and scenes had to be left out because they could have endangered people,” Adil said earlier In an interview with HS.

Adil (b. 1985) is one of the first Afghan women to study documentary film. He came to Finland in 2004 for an internship at Yle. Since then, he has lived mostly in Helsinki.

Hirvonen (b. 1975) is a writer, journalist and documentary director. In his films, he has dealt with immigration in Europe and Finland.

The Secret Reading Club of Kabul premiered at the festival on Monday. Next, the documentary continues its festival tour around the world. In Finland, it won’t be seen until next year.