Exec producer Malala Yousafzai and director Sahra Mani connect with TV Week to discuss their new documentary about women in Afghanistan who are bravely fighting to claw back their freedoms from the oppressive rule of the Taliban
In August 2021, after U.S. forces officially pulled out of Afghanistan, the Taliban seized the capital city of Kabul and retook the control they’d lost at the outset of the War on Terror two decades earlier. Life changed instantly and horrifically — especially for women.
Yet the fight is far from over. Female-led activist groups within the country are still pushing to regain what they’ve lost. Now streaming on Apple TV+, documentary feature Bread & Roses shines a light on both their ordeal and their resolve, following various Afghan women as they do what they can to fight back via protests and other bold, perilous initiatives.
The project was produced by Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence via her company Excellent Cadaver. “It all just collapsed, and [in] a matter of days,” Lawrence told Variety of seeing the situation in Afghanistan unfold on the news back in 2021. “I was watching this from America, where Roe v. Wade was about to be overturned. We felt helpless and frustrated with how to get these stories off of the news cycle and into people’s psyches — to help people be galvanized and care about the plight of these women.”
That impulse led Lawrence to partner with Sahra Mani, an Afghan director now in exile from her home country — forced for this project to rely on footage shot, guerrilla-style, by the subjects themselves.
The final member of the team arrived in Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girls’ education advocate who, in 2014, at age 17, became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner. Yousafzai, of course, knows all about standing up to the Taliban, given that her own activism led to a near-fatal assassination attempt in 2012. Now, she spreads her message globally, meeting with world leaders and lending her voice to projects like Bread & Roses.
“I remember when I was 11 years old and we were living under the Taliban regime in our hometown in the north of Pakistan, and they had issued a ban on girls’ education,” Yousafzai tells TV Week. “And to an 11-year-old, it does not make any sense why she can’t go to school while her brothers can. This is the exact same question that Afghan women and girls ask today: ‘Why can women not have these basic human rights that the men can have?’ . . . I think it’s their own misogyny and patriarchy that’s stuck in their head. They just cannot see women as equal humans. They really have to cleanse their minds, I would say.”
Director Mani, meanwhile, is struck by the hypocrisy of it all: “We know the heads of the Taliban send their own daughters abroad to get education, but they ban school for Afghan women. They understand that education could give power to women. That’s why they want this power for their own daughters, but they don’t want it for the Afghan people. They are trying to destroy a nation.”
One of the goals activists are working towards is to have “gender apartheid” recognized as a crime against humanity by the international community. As Yousafzai explains: “It’s beyond just gender ‘persecution.’ The Taliban are trying to control women in every possible way, and punish them for simply not meeting their dress code, or singing, or speaking out, or stepping outside their home to see a doctor. That’s why we need more accountability in international law against perpetrators like the Taliban . . . If we cannot protect Afghan women in such dire situations, I don’t know how we can give any hope to women in other parts of the world that they could also be protected against such horrors.” Yet amidst those horrors, it’s hope that emerges from Bread & Roses. “It’s truly the resilience of Afghan women that we need to talk about right now,” Yousafzai reflects. “This is a harsh reality under which Afghan women are living, and the Taliban are using every excuse to try to justify it — from culture to religion — but there is no backing for that. It’s the women, it’s the local people who define their culture. We are the true representation of our culture . . .”
Bread & Roses, streaming on Apple TV+