The Venice panel marks the first initiative taken by the festival’s parent organisation, the Venice Biennale, dedicated to the Afghan crisis.
Venice Film Festival has announced details of a panel discussion involving Afghan filmmakers covering the situation for artists in their country since the Taliban seized control.
Sahraa Karimi, head of national cinema body Afghan Film, whose feature Hava, Maryam, Ayesha screened in Venice’s Horizons sidebar in 2019, and documentary director Sahra Mani (A Thousand Girls Like Me), will take part in a panel at the Palazzo del Casino in Venice.
The Venice panel marks the first initiative taken by the festival’s parent organisation, the Venice Biennale, dedicated to the Afghan crisis.
It has now announced an official panel to be held on September 4 on “the need to create humanitarian corridors and guarantee that [Afghan] filmmakers and other artists will be granted the status of political refugees, allowing [them] to leave the country in addition to concerns about their future and the need to help them get settled once they reach Europe,” the fest said in a statement.
The panel will focus on the current crisis in Afghanistan and what the Taliban’s conquest of the country means for the Afghan population, in particular for Afghan artists and filmmakers.
Giuliano Battiston, an Italian journalist who has reported on Afghanistan extensively since 2007, will moderate the panel, which will also feature members of the board of the International Coalition for Filmmakers at Risk (ICFR), the artistic directors of the Rotterdam and Amsterdam film festivals and Matthijs Wouter Knol, the executive director of the European Film Academy.
