A Flickering Truth

Led by Ibrahim Arify, formerly imprisoned by the Afghan regime for his filmmaking activities, a group of engaged cinephiles work to exhume the country’s filmic past, recovering and restoring over 8,000 hours of footage (fiction, documentary…) that they had hidden at the risk of their lives during the Taliban years. The preservation of film history is a challenge for the whole world, but even more so in an Afghanistan ravaged by successive conflicts. Here, the filmmaker, Pietra Brettkelly (The Art Star, The Sudanese Twins), documents the urgent need to conserve this national cinematographic memory.