"I can't say whether we will finish with 50,000 or 100,000 hours," he says, surrounded by shelves stacked with round silver tins containing the reels. They used all sorts of tricks," he adds, smiling.Īrify says they have 32,000 hours of 16-millimetre film and 8,000 hours of 35-mm film, but cataloguing is still ongoing, as members of the public continue to hand in movies that they themselves hid from the Taliban. ""Many were stored in rooms blocked by a brick wall and in fake ceilings. "The reels were hidden in cans marked Indian or Western movies and in barrels buried in the ground," Arify tells AFP.
The digitisation of the footage - of which there are tens of thousands of hours - is being overseen by Afghan Film general director Mohammad Ibrahim Arify. "We were very scared but by God's grace we were able to save the movies and now we have this culture alive," says the 60-year-old Ali, who has worked at Afghan Film for 36 years. The years-long project will bring back to life hugely popular Afghan feature films, centred on love rather than war, and introduce young Afghans to a side of their country they've never known - peace. Two decades later those reels, which include long-lost movies and documentary images of Afghanistan before it was ravaged by violence, are being made available to watch again through digitisation. Two decades later those reels, which include long-lost movies and historic documentary footage are being made available to watch again. Some 7,000 precious films were saved from the Taliban by employees at Afghan Film in the mid-1990s.
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The ultra-conservative Taliban - who banned popular entertainment, including cinema and music, during their brutal 1996-2001 rule - burned several movie reels before leaving.īut they failed to discover some 7,000 precious films that Ali and his colleagues hid in various places across the Kabul premises of Afghan Film.
"If they had found out we had hidden movies they would have killed us." "We did not expect to leave for our homes that day alive," Ali tells AFP, clutching a saved reel. He hid thousands of reels of footage showcasing Afghanistan's rich cultural history, knowing that if the Taliban found out he faced certain death. When the Taliban charged in to Afghanistan's state-run film company in the mid-1990s intent on destroying all the movies, Habibullah Ali risked everything to save them. The Taliban, who banned popular entertainment including cinema and music during their brutal 1996-2001, raided Afghanistan's state-run film company and burned several movie reels - but thousands more were hidden and are now being digitised.
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