_{Filmmaker Aboozar Amini}

Dutch-based Aboozar Amini is more experienced than most participants within this year’s Berlinale Talent Lab. His 2018 feature doc, Kabul, City in the Wind*, about daily life in Afghanistan’s capital, opened IDFA, the world’s most important documentary festival, in 2018, winning the First Appearance Award. He has also been part of the Cannes Cinéfondation and has several acclaimed shorts behind him.

This will be his first visit to the Berlinale. His hope is “to connect to filmmakers who have shared values, and take artistic risks for an urgent story.” He’ll also be networking, looking to meet potential partners on his future projects.

Aboozar has two new films in development. One, previously known as Ways to Run*, is a feature film which was all set to shoot more than a year ago but was derailed when the US withdrew from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, and the Taliban again assumed power.

The director has now re-written the script and the film has a new title, Tahmina: a Pieta in Kabul. He’ll be pushing this in Berlin at EFM, together with his producer Jia Zhao. The project is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund, Hubert Bals Fund (for development) and is a co-production with GreenGround in Canada.

Aboozar has another new project, a feature documentary intended as a sequel to Kabul, City in the Wind. Reflecting the director’s passion of neo-realist cinema, this is called Kabul Year Zero (partly in homage to Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero). The film follows three young characters, one born in Afghanistan, one in Iraq and one in Ukraine.

Born in Afghanistan in 1985, Aboozar was a teenager when he came to the Netherlands but his yearning for his home country is palpable. “My father used to have a bookstore in Kabul and so I have grown up with Persian literature, epic books like ‘Shahnameh’ which still affect my work because in those books you can see the true face of the Afghan people, not the ones we know these days… there is a deeper, older culture existing in those books,” he says.

As a kid, he didn’t have much access to cinema but he did see many classic Japanese films from the 1950s from directors such as Kurosawa and Teshigahara. This work affected him profoundly as did the films of Rossellini and other Italian post-war directors.

Aboozar pays tribute to the patience and flexibility of the Dutch funders who have stood by his new fiction film. “We’ve been through all ups and downs. We almost lost everything because of the situation in Afghanistan, but they [the funders] expressed their supportive attitude.”

The Taliban has erased much of Afghan culture since seizing back power. Aboozar sees his movies as an attempt to preserve that culture. “It is by coincidence we were born there but we feel that it [Afghanistan] does not really belong to us,” he says of the sense of dispossession which so many Afghans feel. Cinema is one way of reclaiming their heritage.
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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund