Press

Variety Interview: August 28, 2021

Sonia Nassery Cole was quoted in Variety on August 28, 2021 in the article “Afghan Female Directors Fear the End of Filmmaking Under Taliban: ‘They Can Easily Find Us, Kill Us, Get Rid of Us.'”

U.S.-based Afghan filmmaker Sonia Nassery Cole (“Black Tulip”) explained that scores of young aspiring filmmakers and camerawomen she and others have mentored are now contacting them with desperate pleas for help getting out.

“I feel so helpless. How am I going to get you out if you can’t even get out of your own house? When the entire U.S. army couldn’t?” says Nassery Cole, currently speaking from Europe in a “constant state of shaking and disbelief.”

Even though her illegal shoots in Afghanistan were never easy, until the events of recent days, the situation still felt promising.

“The pressure [Afghan women] are under builds anger, and then that anger comes out in their talent, and so they fly. That’s where Afghan women were — they were just flying,” says Nassery Cole.

“The art was coming back, the filmmakers were coming back. There’s so much talent in my country, so much hunger to tell the world their stories, but that’s all shut down and pushed behind a dark, dark curtain. I doubt we’ll see another film shot there for the next 30 years.”