Afghan Director Shahrbanoo Sadat on Her Academy Museum Retro and Why ‘Comedy Is Perfect’
variety.comNick Vivarelli International CorrespondentLast August, Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat managed to escape from Kabul with part of her family as Taliban fighters took over the city while U.S.
forces withdrew.Now, her “Weekend With…Shahrbanoo Sadat” event at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, starting on Saturday Jan.
29, will give U.S. audiences an opportunity to dive deep into the bold young filmmaker’s three works: “Not at Home,” “Wolf and Sheep,” and “The Orphanage.”“With everything that’s happened in Afghanistan, I think it’s important, especially for American audiences, to take a look at my films,” Sadat tells Variety, in order to see her country “from a different point of view.” “My cinema focusses on the everyday life of people,” the director notes. “Not at Home,” the first work in the series, is a hybrid documentary/feature film that Sadat co-directed with her German producing partner Katja Adomeit.
It’s about changing dynamics in a family of Afghan refugees who return to Afghanistan, just like her own family did after living in Iran.For health reasons, when the Sadat family relocated from Tehran to an Afghan village, her father was unable to work. “Suddenly the power dynamic changed completely,” she says, because the women were the breadwinners. “I was interested in that,” she notes.
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