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Sahraa Karimi

Filmmaker

My main subjects in high school were mathematics and physics. But when I went to the University, I don’t know, somehow I went into art and studied film directing.

During our interview, I felt very close to Sahraa. We are alike in many ways. We both feel the need to spend time alone, to create, and to do things in our own way. That is easily understood and respected here in the West, but Afghanistan is a very communal society, and group identity and approval by the family is paramount. This way of being keeps society stable and protects it from change. It keeps the group safe, but also inhibits individual blossoming. Afghans who break out of these boundaries are more courageous than we may imagine.

Sahraa was born in Mashhad, Iran, a modern university town near the Afghan border. When she was 13, her father died and she and her mother moved to Tehran, Iran’s capital. After high school, Sahraa went to a university in Slovakia and earned a PhD in film directing. In 2009, she came to Afghanistan, got married, and began teaching at Kabul University. In 2011, to pursue her passion for film making in an environment more conducive to her creative self-expression, she returned to Slovakia. In order to fund her artistic endeavors, she accepted a university teaching job at VMSU, a Slovakian branch of the University of Edinburgh. Her latest film, Nasima: a Refugee Girl’s Everyday Memories, won the Slovakian Academy Award.