Shahrbanoo Sadat, who fled Kabul, Afghanistan, to Germany in 2021 and will next month open the Berlin Film Festival with No Good Men, just world premiered her short film Super Afghan Gym at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). And Maryna Er Gorbach, the Ukrainian director of Klondike, debuted her short Rotation at Rotterdam.
Both shorts were backed by the Displacement Film Fund, a scheme unveiled last year by Cate Blanchett and IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund to provide five displaced directors with €100,000 ($120,000) grants. The other grant recipients were Iranian auteur Mohammad Rasoulof (The Seed of the Sacred Fig), Syria’s Hasan Kattan (Last Men in Aleppo), and Somali-Austrian filmmaker Mo Harawe (The Village Next to Paradise).
In a conversation with THR and during a Rotterdam press conference, Er Gorbach and Sadat discussed their inspirations and hopes for their respective films.
The 12-minute-long Rotation is about a therapeutic hypnosis ritual experienced by a young Ukrainian woman who shifted from civilian life to military service due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She needs support to adapt to the displaced reality she now lives in.
Er Gorbach tells THR that her film came “from this creative freedom we had, because there was no expectation for us. There was so much trust, and we were free to make what we felt strongly about.”
The starting point for Rotation was “my understanding of displacement,” explains the filmmaker. “Right now, I want to talk about the displacement of normality for people who were civilians and came into the army services. How do they adapt to that new reality?”
In her research, she talked to people with insight and learned a lot. “I found out that there are situations when newcomers to the army cannot manage the loss, the death,” explains Er Gorbach. “And sometimes they go to this therapeutic hypnosis where it is proposed that they forgive themselves for [the fact that] they could not save their friends or just say goodbye to them.” So, Rotation is not about physical but “metaphysical and emotional displacement.”
In the month-long casting process, Er Gorbach saw “so many women and men, because it was not only about performance, but about having the right person in the film.” She and her casting director ended up finding journalist Nadiia Karpova for the lead role. “She’s now a war reporter, but she was an actress before the war,” the director explains. “So, she’s basically living this kind of rotation, going to the frontline, shooting, and all that.”
Physical displacement is not the focus of Rotation, but the director decided to shoot it on physical film, namely Svema, a Ukrainian brand of film used for Soviet movies during the era of the Soviet Union. “My team found one of the last film stocks somewhere in a shelter,” Er Gorbach recalls. “After we shot, we put it in paper boxes. We could not bring it in metal boxes because [when we traveled] we had to go through an X-ray. So it was kind of a journey for us.”
Meanwhile, the 14-minute Super Afghan Gym is set in a gym in downtown Kabul, which features posters of muscular men on the walls, where a group of housewives come together during the one hour of the day reserved for women. “They train at lunchtime behind closed doors, talking about body norms and their daily life,” reads a synopsis.
Sadat’s experience of displacement is more a form of “double displacement,” she explains. “My parents fled Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion back in the ’70s. They fled to Iran, and I was born in Iran,” where she experienced “racism against Afghan refugees and immigrants.” Actually, “I experienced a high dose of racism as a child before I understood what racism meant,” she recalls. “I was taking it personally because I was not familiar with racism.”
Her experience also affected how she and other people thought about her identity. “In Iran, I was always called Afghan, even when I’d never been to Afghanistan, and I knew nothing about Afghanistan,” she says. “My parents never talked about it. So I was always trying my best to be Iranian. And then when I moved back to Afghanistan – my parents decided to move back – suddenly everyone called me Iranian.”
She lived there for 20 years, “and then, four years ago, when Kabil collapsed, a lot of people, including me and my family, evacuated to Germany,” recalls Sadat. “And I had a lot of friends [for whom] it was the first time to leave and really experience how life is for refugees. But I didn’t feel that, because I never had the feeling that I belonged to a country. … I was always the other, the foreigner, the one who doesn’t belong to this place.”
Sadat describes film as a form of therapy. “It is a therapy for finding my voice, finding myself, talking about things that matter in the way that I think they matter,” she shares. When she got the call from the Displacement Film Fund, “I just reached the conclusion that this identity of Iranian, Afghan, foreigner, the other person, the displaced person, or whatever, are just the identities that are exposed on me from outside. They’re not coming from me, because from inside, I’m the same person. It doesn’t matter what passport I’m holding. It doesn’t matter if I’m Iranian or German or Afghan. I’m a human being with the experience of living in different places. So it was a kind of liberation for me to get rid of this.”
Super Afghan Gym also deals with questions of identity and home. “As a woman, I never really felt at home in my own body,” Sadat says. “And I think the first, the best, home of everyone is their body. This is very connected to how a woman’s body should look, or what the beauty definition is. I know that is a universal topic. So, I just decided I was going to talk about that experience.”
Social media reactions to news of her short film were divided. “A lot of Afghan men were attacking me, saying I was fabricating this experience. ‘Women are not going into the gym in Kabul. You’re just making this up.’ At the same time, a lot of women were writing to me, saying, ‘We have been going to the gym secretly since the Taliban took over the country, because we cannot go to work, we cannot go to school.’ There are these gyms, and this is the only excitement. This is the highlight of the day for so many women now in big cities. Of course, in villages, that’s not possible.” Concluded Sadat: “It’s been four years since their lives have been stopped. Imagine a lockdown for four years. And there’s no news of how the situation is going to end.”
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