FLIGHT FROM KABUL
Development, Premiere: 2027
Film genre: Drama based on true story
Coutry: Slovakia, Italia
Director: Sahraa Karimi
Screenplay: Sahraa Karimi
Camera:
Producers: Wanda Adamík Hrycová, Domenico Procacci
This is the story of ZIBAA KARIMI, a 30-year old Afghan filmmaker and Government employee, facing the most dangerous 40 hours of her life. Zibaa is a woman on the run. The Taliban have taken over her country and Zibaa must take the most difficult choice: staying and facing potential death or leaving. But fleeing means separating herself forever from her fiancé Samir.
Zibaa is a 30-year-old modern Afghan woman who was educated in Europe. She lives in Kabul and is a filmmaker and director of Afghan Film, a governmental film organization, and she is a very loud anti-Taliban voice. Zibaa has everything she wants: she is preparing the very first national film festival in Afghanistan; great friends, her talented nieces – four of her brother’s daughters who adore her – and Zibaa is in love with Samir, with whom she is planning a wedding. Zibaa has her life completely under control. Everything changes five days before her wedding and two weeks before the start of the film festival when the Taliban invade Kabul on August 15, 2021 and take control of the whole of Afghanistan. Zibaa‘s life is in danger, as her name has been on a Taliban kill list several times. Her life is falling apart at the seams because she has no plan B. To protect her, Zibaa‘s fiancé tells her that she and her family must go with him to the very conservative, male-dominated south where they can be saved. But Zibaa‘s sister-in-law Fatima has lived through the Taliban rule in the 1996s and asks Zibaa to leave the country and save the future of her four daughters.
Zibaa decides to go to the airport without her fiancé, who promises to accompany her, but he never shows up because his father won’t let him. Zibaa‘s more than 24-hour fight for her life begins when she and her family enter Kabul airport and the Taliban arrest her brother. Fatima decides to search for her husband and asks Zibaa to take care of her daughters even if she doesn‘t come back. Zibaa is faced with the most difficult decision of her life: to leave the country alone and follow her professional dreams as a filmmaker in exile or to flee with her nieces and become a refugee single mother of four. Flight from Kabul is told in two parallel storylines, one of which takes place in the present within 24 hours at Kabul airport and the second storyline beginning two months before the fall of Kabul and ending at the airport.
The creation of this film was financially supported by creative europe, pop up residency a midpoint institute
