Roya Sadat’s Afghan film is ready for next year’s Academy Awards
Nisaa FM: - Afghanistan’s submission for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards next year is directed by Roya Sadat. The 85-minute feature film, “A Letter to the President”, has become known as the film where an Afghan woman slaps back: He slapped her — and she slapped back. Harder….
She is Suraya, the senior police detective feared by the city’s criminals, and also a wife and mother of two. Her duties clashes with the expectations at home, despite all her efforts to balance them. She ends up accidentally killing her husband while defending herself from another violent outburst. The letter to the president of the movie’s title is hers; she is writing from prison, where she has landed on death row.
The audience of about 60 people in a smoke-filled Kabul theater erupted in applause, when they saw the slap. “People love that slap,” says Sadat. “It’s not easy for the people to accept a woman slapping a man. But the film affects them. The slap is a really enjoyable slap — in fact, it’s a slap to the face of all the injustice women face here.”
Roya Sadat and her crew say that just the fact of having made “A Letter to the President” feels like a victory. But the real payoff is the reaction to the slap, and the idea that they are succeeding in getting a male-dominated society to empathize with a working woman.
“We have always had an oppressor, and an oppressed, but we have had little discussion of the environment in which the accused lives in,” Ms. Sadat says. By the accused she means the protagonist Suraya.
A long way into film making
Roya Sadat began film making as a high school student in the western city of Herat. “Three Dots,” her first film, about a young woman forced to smuggle drugs, was made more than a decade ago with simple gear in a secluded village that now is under Taliban control.
“Three Dots” caught the eye of Afghanistan’s largest media conglomerate, Moby Group. Moby invited her to direct two television dramas. She directed 50 episodes of one, and three seasons of another.
During one of those projects she met her husband, Aziz Dildar, a young university lecturer in theater who was quickly rushed in as a replacement when one of the main actors, much to Sadat’s frustration, had shown up with a shaved head.
They became an artistic power couple, complementing and supporting each other. The offices of their company, Roya Film House, are below their apartment, in the basement.
Ms. Sadat feels lucky to be married to an artist who is as passionate about film as she is. Mr. Dildar writes the screenplays for their projects, and when she gets into the intense shooting period, he steps in to help. “If it had been someone other than Aziz, I don’t think they would have understood me as much,” Sadat says.
The film took seven hard years to complete
From the time she conceived the story in 2010, it took Roya Sadat about seven hard years to complete the film.
She tried for years to find a producer for her film, but no one was willing to take it on because of the uncertain security environment. So Roya Film House produced it. The couple sold one of their two vehicles, an apartment bought with past directorial fees, and her wedding jewelry. She also relied on friends. Moby Group provided security and technical staff. Friends offered their houses as sets.
But more frustrating were the bureaucratic hurdles afterward, as she tried to meet simple criteria for Oscar selection. Organizing screenings at commercial cinemas was a difficult task because there are just a couple of government cinemas, and they usually show only old Indian movies. If a director wants to screen her own film, she has to rent the cinema and then go through a lengthy process of her film’s content being checked.
Mamnoon Maqsoodi, the veteran Afghan actor who plays the president in the film, called its success a remarkable testament to Sadat’s passion and attention to detail.
“I am touched by her work,” Mr. Maqsoodi said.
Source: www.nytimes.com