The Afghan Alphabet

The Afghan Alphabet (Persian: الفبای افغان‎‎, Alefbay-e afghan) is a 2002 documentary by Mohsen Makhmalbaf showing the life of children in the Afghan villages bordering Iran, and how their life and culture were affected by the Taliban regime.^[1]

Importance

In 2002 about 3 million Afghan refugees were living in Iran. From those about 700,000 were Afghan children who were not allowed to go to Iranian schools because of their illegal status in Iran.^[2] After this movie was made, this subject became controversial and finally the Islamic Consultative Assembly passed a bill to allow Afghani children to go to school and it resulted in 500,000 kids getting education.

Awards & Festival Screenings

• Best Film Award from Document ART International Film Festival, (Germany) 2002^[2]
• Fajr International Film Festival, Iran 2002
• Gotteburg 2003
• Rio 2003
• Busan International Film Festival 2003
• Hong Kong 2003
• Greece 6 March 2002 (Thessaloniki Documentary Festival)
• USA 6 April 2002 (DoubleTake Documentary Film Festival)
• USA 2 June 2002 (Seattle International Film Festival)
• Canada 1 September 2002 (Montréal Film Festival)
• Japan 7 September 2002 (Tokyo)
• USA 4 October 2002 (Chicago International Film Festival)
• South Korea 18 November 2002 (Pusan International Film Festival)
• Singapore 3 May 2003 (Singapore International Film Festival)
• Hungary 4 October 2006 (TV premiere)

References

External links

• The Afghan Alphabet at the Internet Movie Database
• The Afghan Alphabet in the British Film Institute's "Explore film..." database