The Forbidden Reel

The Afghan-Canadian filmmaker Ariel Nasr tells the story of the second half of the 20th century from the perspective of the history of Afghan cinema and the witness of this privileged look that the screen gives us back. Interviews with film historian Mariam Ghani, filmmakers Latif Ahmadi and Siddiq Barmak, actress Yasmin Yarmal and other actors are interspersed with extracts from films – both fiction and documentary – from the archives of the National Film Institute in Kabul, which a small group of people managed to save from destruction during the Taliban regime. The Forbidden Reel shows not only the testimonial value of the archive and the cinema as an artistic expression or factual report in itself, but also as a means of knowing and understanding one’s own history better.

Ariel Nasr is an award-winning Afghan-Canadian documentary filmmaker and screenwriter based in Montreal whose work has been nominated for Oscars and Canadian Screen Awards. He is the director of the National Film Board’s The Boxing Girls of Kabul, Good Morning Kandahar, and the interactive project Portraits of Kabul. After presenting The Forbidden Reel, he has begun work on The Mosque: A Community’s Struggle, a CBC documentary about the 2017 shooting at the mosque in Quebec.