Documentary on Afghanistan Culture

By Catherine Collins

A documentary entitled “The Beauty Academy of Kabul,” which tells the stories of women inAfghanistan’s capital after the fall of the Taliban, will be shown on Oct. 19 at 6 p.m. in Hodson Auditorium.

According to Dr. Kiran Chadda, director of multicultural affairs and international student programs, part of the reason for showing the film on campus is to complement the themes addressed in this year’s First-Year Reads, in which freshmen read “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” a novel by Khaled Hosseini about two women’s lives in Afghanistan spanning the civil war of the 1970s, the rise of the Taliban, and then its fall in 2001.

Since “The Beauty Academy of Kabul” will be screened exactly one week before a lecture by Hosseini on campus, Chadda hopes that students will take advantage of the opportunity to increase their knowledge aboutAfghanistanby watching the documentary.

“Both the film and the novel address the empowerment of women,” said Chadda.

The documentary is about a group of American and Afghan-American hairdressers that travels toKabulafter the fall of the Taliban to open a beauty school and teach Afghan women, who had been brutally oppressed for decades under sharia law, how to express themselves through physical beauty.

“You can see in the movie that these women are so scared and haven’t even left their homes in so long, and you can see in their expressions how happy they are that they can do something,” Chadda said.

The documentary puts a human face onto the struggle of women inAfghanistan, just as Hosseini’s novel does, and it allows viewers a glimpse into the personal lives of real women discovering self-esteem and empowerment.

The panel discussion following the documentary will consist of Fahima Vorgetts, director of the Afghan’s Women Fund, who has spoken at Hood twice in the past, and Dr. Alicia Lucksted, a research psychologist from the University of Maryland.

The Afghan’s Women Fund is an organization that funds projects inAfghanistan, specifically building schools and supporting literacy projects.

The documentary and panel discussion are being funded by the Office of Multicultural Affairs and International Student Programs, the Dean of Students, the Honors Program, the Office of the Provost, the Career Center and Office of Service Learning, the First-Year Read Program and Student Activities and Orientation.