26/11/2024 - Najiba and Rasul Noori leverage their own subjectivity to create a tremendously powerful work on emancipation, freedom and opportunity for women in Afghanistan

After world-premiering a few days ago in the International Competition at IDFA, Writing Hawa [+see also:
interview: Najiba Noori, Rasul Noori
film profile] won the FIPRESCI Award, with the jury stating, “The film gives us an essential insider testimony from a territory where freedoms are at stake, especially for women.” This only begins to scratch the surface of what Afghan filmmaker and journalist Najiba Noori begins to do as director in this documentary, co-directed by her brother Rasul Noori and lensed by both. As the middle generation but odd one out in this story of three generations of women in her family, Najiba expertly and affectively unveils the precipitous situation for women in Afghanistan before and after the Taliban takeover in 2021 – particularly young ladies from the historically persecuted Hazara ethnic group. Coming from video and journalism backgrounds, the siblings carefully capture the limited scope of everyday possibility, owning their subjectivity and leveraging it to create a quiet tour de force of essential filmmaking.

With a script penned by Najiba and Iranian documentarian Afsaneh Salari (the latter also serving as editor), Writing Hawa adeptly weaves together several major throughlines. All of them centre loosely on Najiba’s mother, Hawa, who resolves to learn how to read and write while also opening her own business. Zahra, Najiba's 14-year-old niece, escapes back to Hawa and the family after 12 years in the custody of her abusive father. The Taliban takeover triggers a major backslide in all of the aforementioned advances – as well as Najiba’s departure from the country to Paris.

Hawa, forced at 13 to marry a man 30 years older than her, never received a formal education. She is resigned to taking care of her aging husband, beset by severe dementia, her lifetime love for his cousin now a forgone dream. Hawa spares no words condemning the generations before her: “Our parents were naive,” says her friend coerced into the same fate. “Our parents were idiots,” corrects Hawa, betraying the decades of pure rage bubbling beneath the surface, seemingly unlocked by the camera itself. And so, the tale becomes a triumphant search for truly self-guided emancipation, deeply championed – although never guided, never pushed – by the children to whom she gave so much. And the Taliban? “They’re a bunch of uneducated savages, those sons of bitches,” spits Hawa.

Najiba interjects occasionally with a matter-of-fact voiceover that, although significantly sparser, is reminiscent of that in Farahnaz Sharifi’s My Stolen Planet [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. Some moments simply speak for themselves. From behind the camera, Najiba asks, with an obvious hint of fear, “What if they force you into a marriage?” With a completely defeated look on her face, the young Zahra replies, “I’ll use the phone to call you.”

This is a story where the subjectivity of the one writing about the film must be called into question, where moments like this are simply impossible to reckon with from an external vantage point. The filmmaking triggers an almost delayed response, where later we realise both filmmaker and subject, aunt and niece, are witnesses to what is soon to be the inevitable. We, as spectators and writers safely shielded behind our screens, are simply privileged voyeurs.

The power in the honest, unpretentious filmmaking of Writing Hawa is being able to force into question this dialectic between voyeur and witness, which hangs lower and lower over the film as it goes on. Hawa cries out as she describes her daughter’s successful flight: “Najiba is gone, but what about the girls who are left behind?” The filmmaker, video-calling Hawa in a grey zip-up hoodie – an instantly recognisable symbol of mass-manufactured Western consumer culture – confronts it even more head-on: “I tell myself, ‘Look at this universe you're in, and then look at the universe you come from. Such different universes!’”

A particularly poignant shot sees the filmmaker’s rain-dappled reflection in a Paris window as she quietly smokes a cigarette: a moment of solitude outside, a young lifetime of emotion within. Soulful original music by Afshin Azizi, dominated by the mournful plucked strings of the setar and rubab, completes the image. Its dually joyful and realist end titles snap the story into place: frankly, we are only privy to this piece of powerful filmmaking out of somewhat extraordinary circumstances.

Writing Hawa is a French-Dutch-Qatari-Afghan production by Tag Film, co-produced by Een van de jongens, Arte France and EOdocs. Its world sales are managed by Swiss-based First Hand Films.