Salar Pashtoonyar’s documentary short begins by discussing how the Soviet invasion of 1979 fundamentally altered life in Afghanistan. Over footage of people going about their day in a busy mountainous city, an unnamed narrator, voiced by Fereshta Afshar, describes the devastation. In the course of the Soviet-Afghan war, a million Afghan civilians were killed, and the nation’s food supply was decimated. The insecurity brought about by the war exacerbated the issue of child marriage. Families, Afshar says, sometimes wedded their daughters off as a way to avoid starvation.
Then Afshar tells a tale of migration, scandal, and an unnamed woman’s early marriage—an event that, Afshar says, felt like a funeral. As Afshar unspools the woman’s intimate story, some of the details of which have been changed for her protection, the footage continues to show daily life in Afghanistan, highlighting the connection between geopolitics and personal life
