Afghanistan’s Lost Movies, Hidden from the Taliban, Go Digital

From AFP (Agence France-Presse):

When the Taliban charged in to Afghanistan’s state-run film company in the mid-1990s intent on destroying all the movies, Habibullah Ali risked everything to save them.
He hid thousands of reels of footage showcasing Afghanistan’s rich cultural history, knowing that if the Taliban found out he faced certain death.
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But they failed to discover some 7,000 precious films that Ali and his colleagues hid in various places across the Kabul premises of Afghan Film.

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Two decades later those reels, which include long-lost movies and documentary images of Afghanistan before it was ravaged by violence, are being made available to watch again through digitisation.
The years-long project will bring back to life hugely popular Afghan feature films, centred on love rather than war, and introduce young Afghans to a side of their country they’ve never known — peace.

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