Comprised of videos taken by women in Kabul on their own phones, the film reveals a fierce Afghan resistance to the Taliban’s cruel gender apartheid edicts that’s virtually unknown to the outside world.
In her new documentary, Bread & Roses, filmmaker Sahra Mani reveals the fierce and courageous resistance of Afghan women defying the Taliban—who wish to make them disappear.
In the summer of 2021, Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani headed to a film festival in Europe. The trip was a normal part of her life after making a stunning documentary called A Thousand Girls Like Me three years earlier.
That film follows a courageous young Afghan woman who dared to force her own father to stand trial for years of sexual abuse. Already the mother of two babies born of incest, she refused to remain silent any longer. Justice, she said, was the only thing that would protect her daughter from such horror.
It was a shocking topic in Afghanistan, Mani told Ms.: “For me, it was kind of [an] achievement. The film was not allowed to show in Tunisia or other countries. … That a woman from Afghanistan is able to make a film that may scare other governments—that’s great, right?”
It did, predictably, embarrass the Afghan government too, but, she adds, “young women activists … they applauded me for talking of something forbidden.”
That Mani could make such a bold documentary in 2018 reflects what was possible for a new generation of Afghan women and girls who came of age after 9/11 and the fall of the earlier Taliban regime. They were educated. They were elected to Parliament, became journalists, musicians, lawyers, midwives—held jobs of all kinds. They socialized in public and expected to create their own futures.
“I packed light,” Mani remembers about that trip to the film festival. She never expected that her brief journey out of the country would leave her stranded after the shocking fall of Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021.
“Overnight, tragedy happened,” Mani says. “And we all lost everything we had.”
Mani’s embrace of her life and work in Afghanistan was so strong, she had put in her marriage contract a clause that her husband could never take her away. Yet suddenly, it was dangerous to be in her beloved country. She had become a high-profile target of the Taliban.
Though in exile, the filmmaker found her way back to Afghanistan through videos taken by women living under Taliban rule. Those videos are at the heart of her extraordinary new film, Bread & Roses, now streaming on Apple TV+. Taken by women on their own phones, at great risk, the videos reveal a fierce resistance that is virtually unknown to the outside world.
Refusing to be erased, these young women face down the Taliban in frightening scenes on the streets, where protestors are tear-gassed, chased down and beaten. The videos also defy the Taliban in a different way, through scenes documenting intimate moments in the homes they were restricted to—complaining of boredom, dressing up and laughing or quietly teaching a mother to read.
“I think resistance and hope [have an] important role in the life of women of Afghanistan,” Mani says. “They clearly know that the only option for them is … to fight back.”
Yet even Mani was amazed at the bravery on display when, while working with a charity outside the country, she started receiving videos from Afghan women. She collected them as precious proof of a terrible history that needed to be remembered. Until one day she received a surprising invitation. Oscar-winning actor Jennifer Lawrence’s production company Excellent Cadaver, along with fellow executive producer Justine Ciarrocchi, reached out to Mani about making a film: a documentary about Afghan women, by Afghan women, at a time when the world had stopped seeing them.
To make such a documentary from outside the country was clearly a challenge. Mani had amazing unpolished videos, plus plenty of archival tape. But she and her crew also went on to train several activists in the art of capturing their lives and struggles on a daily basis. (Also, importantly, how to delete those perilous videos after sending them to the filmmakers.)
It’s not a coincidence that these activists are all young women. Their determination and spirit, their fury at seeing their rights taken away, their courage, all flowed from a lifetime of experiencing a new kind of freedom.
“I focus on modern women from my generation,” Mani says, “because in the news of Afghanistan, probably you saw women with burka. That was not the reality [in] Afghanistan. The reality of Afghanistan were us. … We were very different from our mother[s].” Her mother’s generation is deeply conservative, Mani explains: “They want us to follow … the role that men dictate to them. We don’t want to follow the role. We will find our own role … through social media … Netflix, Apple TV … link[ed] by the internet to the free world.”
There are no burkas being worn by the three women featured throughout Bread & Roses.
There’s Taranom, who eschews veils for a collection of jaunty caps that would never cover her face. Unheard of in Afghanistan, Taranom lived alone in an arty apartment in Kabul. She’d been a social activist helping impoverished children who were forced to work on the streets. In the film, she tries to escape, only to find herself stuck in a dusty town over the border in Pakistan, lonely, lost and full of regret.
There’s Sharifa. She is from the Hazara, a marginalized and brutalized ethnic group that had finally thrived in recent years. Sharifa was pursuing a promising career working for the government. Forced to give up the work she loved, Sharifa sees her world shrink down to life at home with her parents, with nothing to do, and she is overcome with boredom—until she joins the resistance.
And then there is Zahra. She defied her conservative family by becoming a dentist. She proudly puts up a sign announcing her practice and enjoys a fiancé who supports her and her profession. But as she gets increasingly involved in organizing and leading protests against the Taliban, Zahra sacrifices her dental practice and nearly her life.
It is in the waiting room at Zahra’s dentist office that women gather in a scene that American feminist activists would find poignant: a dozen women holding pens and large papers soon to be placards, consulting with each other on how to frame their demands for bread, education, work and freedom.
Another scene is jaw-dropping. A protest organizer is forced into a car as she taunts her captors. “Then come and kill me,” she shouts, before repeating, “then kill me,” over and over again, daring the Taliban police to shut her up. All the while, she’s balancing a phone on her knee, recording everything.
“It was really brave of her,” Mani says. “They didn’t go to [the] street to film [themselves]. They went there asking for their right[s]. But at the same time, they were wise enough to capture the moment, because they want to share to the world … how cruel Taliban are. But I believe in the moment she started filming, she was more focused on her argument with the Taliban guy than filming!”
One moment, both heart-wrenching and inspiring, shows a group of little girls hugging their activist aunt upon her return from a Taliban jail. At first, they are crying inconsolably. And then they change. Looking straight into the camera, seeming to understand the world they too have lost, these small, fierce rebels begin to protest loudly, demanding rights they may never know.
Recorded over many months, Bread & Roses offers moments of tenderness and cheer and even beauty. But it never loses sight of how brutal the Taliban can be. Still, Mani knows her film, relying as it does on videos sent by women about their own lives, could only go so far depicting atrocities happening all over the country.
“There were so many women. They were kidnapped by Taliban, and they disappear,” Mani says. “Some of these women, their family find their dead body in a different part of the city, and some of them still are [missing].
“The film is just a piece of reality,” she continues. “But reality itself, it’s more harsh and even difficult to think about it. It’s not only about women … not allowed to go to work and get education. It’s about how this system [is] dealing with the women. … Because they are asking for their basic right, they got killed. They were facing extrajudicial killing and kidnapping, arresting, torturing.”
And if they do come out alive, they risk being blamed and potentially cast out of their family and community, Mani adds: “Because of a stigma in Afghan society, they are not even able to share what exactly happened to them in the prison while they [were] arrested by Taliban.”
Everyone involved in the making of Bread & Roses says they want the world to see that which is hard to believe. As the filming progressed, another famous name came on as an executive producer: Malala Yousafzai. She came into the international spotlight when she was just a schoolgirl in Pakistan. Malala—as she is known—spoke out about girls’ right to an education after the Taliban took over her town and forced girls to leave school. As punishment, a member of the Taliban attacked her and shot her in the face.
Yousafzai’s passionate fight for women’s rights and her Noble Peace Prize give her a unique credibility to champion this documentary. She has said she hopes the film will move people to pressure their representatives to keep a focus on Afghanistan, donate and support activists outside Afghanistan who are raising their voices at the U.N. and elsewhere connect online with Afghan women and girls and share their stories.
Mani hopes for that and more. “Women activists in Afghanistan are fighting to convince [the] international community to recognize gender apartheid in Afghanistan. And Taliban should [be held] accountable for the crime they have done for Afghan women,” she says. “They should pay.”
Beyond the limits on jobs and education, the Taliban have imposed nearly a hundred rules governing what women can and can’t do. They have banned women from running bakeries, getting driver’s licenses, laughing in public or talking to each other loud enough for others to hear.
“The restrictions from the Taliban [are] unending,” Mani says. “Like not going out without [a] chaperone, not able to take a taxi, not go to the public event, not to the park, not to [a] beauty salon, not to her mom. Now women are not able to sing for another woman behind a door!”
The list is dizzying, even by the standards of what the Taliban have done in the past.
“It’s unending restriction, which is not coming from normal people,” Mani says. “I think there is a dangerous madness behind all this restriction that we have to take seriously.”
Back in the months before the country’s democratic government fell, a prominent Afghan women’s rights activist predicted that if the long war ended and the Taliban took over again, there would be peace. But the country’s 20 million women and girls would find themselves living in a “peaceful prison.”
That has come to pass. And day by day, the Taliban are finding more and stranger ways to make women disappear.
Support our Afghan sisters: Join Feminist Majority Foundation’s (publisher of Ms.) campaign demanding that the U.N. recognize gender apartheid as an international crime at stopgenderapartheid.org.
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Ms., which hits newsstands Feb. 12. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.
