Coming to theatres today, Friday, November 20: FRAME BY FRAME
Alexandria Bombach and Mo Scarpelli’s made its debut at SXSW this Spring. It has since screened at Hot Docs, BFI London, AFI Docs, Ashland, Camden, Seattle, Nashville, Cleveland, Dallas, Telluride Mountainfilm, Sidewalk, Citizen Jane, New Orleans, and Documentary Edge, among others.
Under the Taliban, photography was forbidden in Afghanistan, viewed as an affront to Islam. In the years since the regime’s ouster, photography has made a comeback, capturing a nation still rebuilding and in many ways reckoning with its recent past. Bombach and Scarpelli profile four photojournalists as they demonstrate the importance of capturing images of their country and its people, both to bear witness to present day concerns and to resist the repression of the past regime and its insidious continued influence. Most interesting of the four subjects are husband and wife Massoud Hossaini and Farzana Wahidy – he is the most acclaimed, a Pulitzer Prize winner for a harrowing photo of a child taken after a religious procession was bombed; she controversally focuses on Afghan women in her work, including the disturbing prevalence of self-immolation or forced immolation of women. The other pair of photographers here offer perspectives both veteran and neophyte, but don’t carry the emotional heft of either Hossaini or Wahidy’s work, who likely could have carried the well-produced project by themselves.
what (not) to doc 