The Orphanage

When fifteen-year-old street kid Qodrat is arrested for illegally reselling cinema tickets, he’s put in an orphanage on the outskirts of Kabul. Here, for the first time in his life, he receives some education, goes on a school trip to Moscow, makes friends, falls in love and in the meantime tries to avoid two older boys who terrorise the dormitories. Qodrat’s love of film colours his most lively memories, in which he and his friends sing to one another like Bollywood stars.

The diaries of Anwar Hashimi, which together with Shahrbanoo Sadat’s own memories formed the basis for her feature debut, Wolf and Sheep, also supply the raw material for her second film, set in the late 1980s/early 1990s: shortly before the downfall of the Soviet-oriented Watan Party regime. Rawness and nostalgia fold into one another in this bittersweet coming-of-age drama, with Hashimi himself in the likeable role of class mentor.

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