Thousands of families still live beneath the statue of Buddha destroyed by the Taliban. Baktay, a six-year-old Afghan girl, is goaded into going to school by their neighbours' son who reads the alphabets in front of their cave. On her way to school, she is harassed by boys playing games cruelly mimicking their violent society. The boys want to stone Baktay or destroy her like the Buddha or shoot her like the Americans do in the labyrinth of caves. Will Baktay be able to overcome these obstacles in order to learn the alphabets of her mother tongue?
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| Hana Makhmalbaf |
| Teheran, 1988. Comes from a distinguished family of filmmakers (daughter of Mohsen Makhmalbaf and sister of Samira Makhmalbaf). Her first short film, The Day My Aunt Was Ill, was presented at Locarno Festival in 1997, when Hana was only 9. At the age of 14, she made the documentary Joy of Madness, about the shooting of her sister’s film At Five in the Afternoon, and at the age of 15 published her first book of poems, Visa for One Moment. Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame is her first feature. |
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