The Orphanage (2019)

Qodrat and Hasib on a motorbike

The Orphanage is about life in an orphanage, no shock there, but what makes it fascinating is that it’s an orphanage in Afghanistan in the late 1980s while it was under Soviet rule. Director Shahrbanoo Sadat’s film is based on her friend Anwar Hashimi’s unpublished 800-page diaries, which also inspired her previous film, Wolf and Sheep, the first film ever brought to Cannes by a female Afghan director. A further three instalments of what will ultimately be a pentalogy are planned, so Sadat clearly has faith in the source material. Qodratollah Qadiri, also a holdover from Wolf and Sheep, plays a hustling street kid in Kabul who is picked up one day by … Read more