What does it mean to represent a country that no longer represents you? Natalie Halla’s The Last Ambassador, which premiered at CPH:DOX earlier this year and has now screened at the Reykjavík International Film Festival (RIFF), tackles this question through the extraordinary story of Manizha Bakhtari, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Austria when the Taliban seized power in August 2021. The result is an intimate, quietly forceful documentary about resilience, defiance and the profound solitude of political exile.

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Bakhtari, a feminist, writer and diplomat, suddenly finds herself in a surreal position: the official representative of a state now ruled by an organisation she has fought against her entire life. Rather than resigning, she decides to continue her mission from Vienna, becoming one of the loudest international voices for Afghan women. As the film unfolds, Halla constructs a multifaceted portrait that merges the political with the personal, showing not only Bakhtari’s determined advocacy work but also her moments of exhaustion, sorrow and displacement. The balance between these registers is one of the doc’s quiet achievements.

The director adopts a restrained, respectful approach, letting Bakhtari’s words and actions carry the emotional weight rather than imposing stylistic excess. Archival footage and news headlines are seamlessly woven into the narrative, helping to anchor the story in time and to recall the rapid disappearance of Afghanistan from global attention. Halla’s camera sometimes lingers on the ambassador’s sparsely populated office - an early sequence reveals that she had to dismiss most of her staff, leaving her driver to juggle several roles just to keep the embassy functioning. Such details highlight the strange limbo in which she operates: representing a silenced people while barely managing to keep her own mission alive.

At the heart of the film lies the “Daughters” programme, an underground network that allows Afghan girls to pursue education in secret, in direct defiance of the Taliban’s ban on schooling for women. Halla gives this initiative the space it deserves, showing how it has become a lifeline in a country where learning itself has turned into an act of rebellion. The risks are made painfully clear: if caught, the students and teachers involved could face severe punishment. 

Throughout, the film captures a dual feeling of resistance and isolation. Bakhtari’s struggle takes place as the world’s attention moves elsewhere, and as news from Afghanistan gradually disappear from international headlines. The silence surrounding her cause mirrors her own loneliness, her diplomatic title turning into a kind of exile. 

By the end, when Kabul appears under a thick layer of snow, the imagery acquires a chilling metaphorical resonance: a city entering a glacial era of repression and stillness, its voices frozen beneath the surface. Whether intentional or not, the image encapsulates the film’s underlying message - that the fight for justice continues even when the world stops looking.

Anchored by a naturally charismatic and deeply resilient protagonist, The Last Ambassador stands as both a tribute and a warning. It reminds us that political courage often unfolds far from the spotlight, and that peace, as Bakhtari herself insists, “is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice”. Halla’s documentary may be modest in form, but it resonates through its moral clarity and its empathy for those who refuse to give up on education, dignity and hope in the face of oppression.

The Last Ambassador was produced by Austrian firm Golden Girls Filmproduktion.