The Secret Reading Club of Kabul
Details
In Taliban-ruled Kabul, a group of young women risk everything to secretly read banned books. Inspired by Anne Frank, they film their hidden lives, tracing a path of resistance that leads from Kabul to exile in Tehran and Germany.
DIRECTORS: Shakiba Adil, Elina Hirvonen
SCRIPT: Shakiba Adil, Elina Hirvonen
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Jarkko Virtanen, Ali Jalali, Jamil Yosufi, Dua (pseudonym for security reasons), Rakshana (pseudonym for security reasons), Mahtab (pseudonym for security reasons)
SOUND: Frøde Loes Hvatum, Kimmo Vänttinen
EDITING: Annukka Lilja
MUSIC: Mari Saino
CO-PRODUCER: Johanna Raita, Ten Thousand Images (Norway)
PRODUCERS: Pauliina Piipponen, Marko Talli
PRODUCTION COMPANY: Yellow Film & TV
SALES: Reinvent Yellow
Directors
Shakiba Adil
Shakiba Adil is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, educator, and women's rights activist born and raised in Kabul and living in Finland. She grew up under the first Taliban regime and, after its fall in 2001, became the first woman to appear on Afghan television as well as one of the country's first female documentary filmmakers. Her film, Afghanistan Unveiled (2002), co-directed with an Afghan-French team, was nominated for an Emmy in 2004. Adil has directed documentaries for, among others, the Finnish broadcasting company Yle, combining lived experience and inside knowledge of Afghanistan with an uncompromising artistic voice.
Elina Hirvonen
Elina Hirvonen is an award-winning Finnish documentary filmmaker and author whose work has been recognized internationally. Her first feature Paradise: Three Journeys in This World won the main prize for student films at IDFA 2007. Boiling Point, 2017, was named Best Documentary at the Lübeck Nordisk Film Days and Uruguay's Tenemos Que Ver festival. She has recently been awarded the WSOY Foundation Recognition Award for artistic achievement (2023), the Finnish Red Cross Human Reach Award (2024) and both the Finnish PEN and International Press Institute Finland awards for her contributions to freedom of expression.
Contact
Suvi Railo
Advisor / International Promotion and Cultural Export of Documentary Films
• festival distribution strategy for documentary films
• travel, project and material and marketing support for documentary films
+358 9 6220 3021