Alka and Roya Sadat
Fabrica will be hosting the two Afghan directors Alka and Roya Sadat for a lecture on what it means to be a female director in today’s Afghanistan and about the situation for women there. Through their documentaries, Roya and Alka, respectively 25 and 21, want to tell the world about the plight of women in their country and the violence that they daily undergo. Their passion for directing developed under the Taliban regime, when women were not allowed to leave the house, and they could neither study nor work; so Roya and Alka learned the basics of their art from books, then perfected it as autodidacts. Among their work, one should especially note Alka’s prizewinning documentary “1,2,3…?” (2007), a short filmed in Afghan hospitals that shows the desperation of young women who set themselves on fire to escape the violence they suffer at home. The lecture is organized by Fabrica Video, the Fabrica division that has been led by Iranian-Canadian director Babak Payami since January 2008. Before this, in 2001, Fabrica worked with him as coproducer of the film Secret Ballot, which Payami also directed. That year, the film won the Special Director’s Award at the Venice Film Festival.
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Alka and Roya Sadat |
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