After Escape, Afghan Director Mourns Her Lost Country

Shahrbanoo Sadat, whose first film “Wolf and Sheep” won an award linked to the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, and nine family members were among thousands of Afghans brought out by foreign governments before the last U.S. troops pulled out last week.

They spent 72 hours in line at the Kabul airport, fighting to get out. The first night, Afghan troops “were very aggressive, shooting from 6 p.m. until 10 a.m. We couldn’t go forward, even a few meters.” So the family tried another gate.

“We slept in a queue, moving every five minutes a few centimeters,” she said.

Once in France, she was taken to an abandoned building in a Paris suburb that the government hastily converted into temporary shelter for those fleeing Afghanistan.

“For three days, we were in complete quarantine so we couldn’t go anywhere. I didn’t have internet,” she said. “When they released us, we had only two hours and I ran to the mobile shop to get a SIM card. But other people, they went to the Eiffel Tower,” she said.

“I was angry because … we lost a country and people seemed to me very careless,” thinking about tourism instead of their homeland, she said. “But on the other hand, we already lost it, so what is the point of crying?”

As a filmmaker, Shahrbanoo Sadat watched with fascination as Taliban fighters took over her city and terrified crowds animated the streets. But as an Afghan woman, she also watched the scene through another prism and knew: It was time to flee.

After her family’s harrowing escape from Kabul, Sadat is now warning world governments: “The Taliban is a terrorist group and the world should realize they are dangerous,” she said in an interview.

“I’m losing my belief in democracy, in human rights, in women’s rights,” she said, because she feels that Western countries aren’t doing enough to defend these things in Afghanistan.

Sadat joined a protest Sunday by aid groups and others demanding that Western governments do more to help those left behind and put pressure on the Taliban. Some Afghans who have been struggling for years to get asylum joined the demonstration, along with those who recently arrived.

Sadat is worried about relatives still in Afghanistan — and about one of her actors, who stayed in his native Panjshir province to try to defend it.


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