Normally, Iranian Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Afghans Atiq Rahimi and Siddiq Barmak run film festivals. For the past three months, however, these three multi-award-winning filmmakers have put their personal plans on hold to help Afghan directors, artists, journalists and intellectuals leave a country that has fallen back to the yoke of the Taliban. Their mobilization made it possible, in August, to exfiltrate to France nearly 270 people, of whom about twenty have since emigrated to other European countries. Even today, the trio are on the verge of war to save some 530 Afghans who could not be evacuated.
Twenty years that these three have known each other, appreciated each other and sometimes supported each other. Exiled in France respectively since 1985 and 2015, Atiq Rahimi and Siddiq Barmak have never severed ties with their native land, which is also the country of the heart of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, leader, with the late Abbas Kiarostami, of the new Iranian wave. Mohsen Makhmalbaf shot a dozen films there, including Kandahar (2001), devoted to the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban regime.
His contribution, both financial and technical, was decisive in the production, in 2002, of the film Osama, by Siddiq Barmak, drama telling the fate of an Afghan girl victim of a fundamentalist nightmare. Together, the two filmmakers subsequently organized workshops and training sessions for young Afghan directors.
Establishment of a “crisis unit”
Atiq Rahimi was, by his own admission, cut off from the world in his French village 100 kilometers from Paris, immersed in writing two scripts, when, on July 26, Siddiq Barmak called him in despair. The Afghan filmmakers and actors they know are in a panic, one Afghan city after another is falling. The fall of Kabul is inexorable. “I received a hundred messages every day”, reports the filmmaker from Panchir who has lived in Angers for six years.
“We talked to each other at all hours of the night, we feared that if we slept, lives would be lost. »Mohsen Makhmalbaf
2008 Goncourt Prize for his novel Syngué sabour. Stone of patience (POL), Atiq Rahimi knows the Parisian intelligentsia well. Very quickly, the two friends improvise a crisis unit, quickly joined by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, based in London for ten years after a stay in France. “On the one hand, we wondered if it was good that thousands of intellectuals left Afghanistan and thus abandoned the country to the Taliban alone, remembers the Iranian filmmaker. On the other side, there was no choice, their lives were in danger. ”
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