Film

VIEW FROM A GRAIN OF SAND

12:00 noon, Sunday, November 18th, Roxie Theater, San Francisco
Admission: $9
Director: Meena Nanji
Country: USA (2006)
Running Time: 80 min, Color / B&W, DV
English, Dari, Pashto with English subtitles                     

Three remarkable Afghan refugee women (a doctor, a teacher and a women's rights activist), consider the effects of the past 30 years of Afghan. Since 2001, international media interest in Afghani women living under the Taliban has fallen, and with it, public knowledge of the current situation they face. What are their lives like now? Have they gained any real rights or do they still live in fear and repression?  

Shot over a three-year period in the sprawling refugee camps of north-western Pakistan and in the war-torn city of Kabul, this film also highlights the work of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a group that was often the only witness of that country's brutality against women.

Of South Asian origin and born in Kenya, documentarian Meena Nanji moved to London when she was nine and Los Angeles when she was seventeen. Meena Nanji has been working in experimental and documentary film/video for the last twelve years. Her films View From a Grain of Sand, Voices of the Morning, Living in Color and It Is A Crime have been recognized by the Rockefeller Foundation, the NEA, Paul Robeson Fund, The American Film Institute, and NAATA.