AGAINST All Odds

The Afghan documentary filmmaker Sahra Mani talks about the making of Bread & Roses and having Hollywood A-lister Jennifer Lawrence as a producer

- Sahra Mani

In the weeks and months following the fall of Kabul on August 15, 2021, documentary filmmaker Sahra Mani started to receive daily vlogs from women in her home country of Afghanistan. This was real-time footage filmed on phones by "educated and working women who believed that they can and should be equal partners in the future of our country". "Instead, they had started losing all their rights, from education to working to even stepping out of their homes," says Mani. Around the same time, the filmmaker received an e-mail from Excellent Cadaver, a production company headed by Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence and her producing partner Justine Ciarrocchi, offering their support in case she wanted to make a film about women in Afghanistan. This is how the documentary, Bread & Roses, which premiered at Cannes in 2023 and is now on Apple TV+, was born.