FLIGHT FROM KABUL

Development, Premiere: 2026

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 instutue