One of the major themes of Writing Hawa, showing at IDFA 2024, can be encapsulated in an exchange about halfway through the film. The exchange is between two older women in Afghanistan who, as kids, were forced into marriage.
“Our parents were naïve,” says one. “They were idiots,” says the other.
It hardly matters which one of them is right. The women themselves laugh at the end of this exchange, as though saying, what’s past is past. For at least one of them, the titular Hawa, the present comes across as more important. She wants to learn to read and write. She also wants much better for her kids, one of whom is Najiba Noori, the film’s director.
But when the film opens, Hawa lives in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital city that’s famous for a few reasons, none of which include a penchant for encouraging the freedom of its women. Indeed, the perniciousness of patriarchy and its female victims are the film’s target. The synopsis provided by IDFA foregrounds Hawa’s quest for literacy but Noori’s film has broader concerns.
Covering a particularly troubled time in Kabul, the film situates Noori’s family’s issues within the culture and politics of Afghanistan. On the home-front, one of Hawa’s grandkids has escaped from her father and come to live with her grandmother. On the national level, the U.S., which had contributed to the country’s chaos, is on the verge of fleeing.
“We all lost Afghanistan,” Noori says. She credits her mother with making sure that she escaped the strictures of her country. While her mother was forced into marrying as a kid, both women are scared that the escapee grandchild will meet the same fate. What to do about it?
There just isn’t a lot to do when the laws and customs of the land are firmly not on your side. So, if Writing Hawa was the product of fiction, the film could reasonably be expected to figure out a solution, at least, to the possibility of Hawa’s grandkid marrying an older man while still in her teens. But in a country where someone over the radio says, “European feminism uses women’s rights as an excuse to force women to go naked, thereby exposing them to rape and violence” viewers shouldn’t expect a heroic triumph.
Still, there are moments where the narrative is leavened occasionally by humour, some of which are quite grim—as is the case when Hawa cracks a joke on the Taliban not wasting their bullets on old people like her and her mentally ailing husband.
At less than 90 minutes, Writing Hawa is a rather slight project, something Noori appears to concede right at the start of the film when she says she had to abandon the film she was making of her mother’s life. In essence, the film that has reached IDFA and, soon, other festivals, is a dream truncated. It’s unfortunate since Ma Hawa is a very compelling presence on the screen.
And yet, the truncated nature of the film is an unfortunate metaphor for Afghanistan itself. The country should be more, and known for more than its conflicts. It’s not. One can imagine a version of Writing Hawa with more Hawa would attract viewers outside those who are big fans of documentaries. The fall of Kabul has robbed audiences of a fuller experience of Noori’s project.
Director: Najiba Noori
Co-director: Rasul Noori
Screenplay: Najiba Noori, Afsaneh Salari
Producer: Christian Popp for Tag Film
Co-producer: Hasse van Nunen for Een van de jongens, Renko Douze for Een van de jongens
Cinematography: Najiba Noori, Rasul Noori
Editing: Afsaneh Salari
Sound Design: Tim van Peppen
Music: Afshin Azizi
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
In Arabic
84 minutes
