Meet Afghanistan’s most controversial actress (she bares her shoulder)
Actress Fereshta Kazemi agreed to show skin during filming of The Icy Sun, hoping it would spark debate about women’s rights.
By: Rick Westhead
A glimpse of a woman’s shoulder. A long shot showing the curves of her bare back.
In Afghanistan, those onscreen images are often considered pornography.
Yet during the filming of The Icy Sun, a movie about a young woman trying to make it in Afghanistan’s fledgling film industry, actress Fereshta Kazemi agreed to show her shoulder and back.
She believed it would be a much-needed addition to the debate about women’s rights in the country.
Afghanistan’s human rights commission recently said that violence against women is at an all-time high. Human Rights Watch says 95 per cent of girls and half of women in Afghan jails have been convicted of “moral crimes.” The Afghan government has considered stoning as a punishment for adultery.
TV star Shaima Rezayee was murdered in her Kabul home in 2005 after becoming the first western-influenced music presenter to appear on local TV.
In 2012, three young actresses were knifed outside a mosque. One died. According to the Los Angeles Times, witnesses said the women had been threatened by men for “un-Islamic” behaviour.
The attack sent other actresses into hiding.
Kazemi, 34, said that while some Afghans have accused her of being naked during the filming of the controversial scene — she is filmed looking at her bruised body in a bathroom mirror after being raped by a producer — she was wearing a tube top.
“Europeans do nudity and do it well, but at least we can dance around the edges,” Kazemi said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “The body of a woman is not something that is discussed in Afghanistan, but maybe this is a chance to change that.
“It’s like if you go on a roof with a feather pillow and you cut it open and release the feathers, you will never get them back in the pillow,” Kazemi said. “It’s the same with this discussion about women. Once it happens, you can’t go back.”
During the 1970s and 1980s, Kabul was known as “the Paris of Central Asia.” Women attended university, held jobs and were free to wear skirts. But as the Taliban seized control in the 1990s, educated Afghanis fled and extremism took root.
Kazemi was born in Kabul but left as a toddler when her family moved to Thailand. She returned to film The Icy Sun in late 2012, renting an apartment for a year and reconnecting with her childhood home.
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| Women in burkas stare at actress Fereshta Kazemi, with her bare legs and uncovered head, while walking in Old Kabul's Shar-e-Kohna neighbourhood in December, 2012. |
She had a lot to learn. For instance, she arrived at the Kabul airport wearing a tank top and leggings. “My cousin ran at me asking me to put my jacket on.”
Kazemi, who grew up in New York and Los Angeles, was startled to learn that women in Afghanistan can be jailed for being raped.
“And women who ran away from home for being raped were thrown in jail, too,” she said. “. . . Men demand to know what they did during that time they were away and they are immediately thrown in jail.”
The film’s director, Ramin Mohammadi, fled Afghanistan in July after mullahs confronted him at his Kabul home because of his controversial films. The director had been working on a new movie about a love affair between a Hindu and Muslim Afghani. Mohammadi is now living as a refugee in Denmark, which has complicated efforts to submit The Icy Sun to major festivals.
Following one showing of the movie in Kabul, Kazemi, who often wore a hijab during her time in Afghanistan, said some men told her she had “ruined” herself.
“Some people think I’m nude, when I’m not,” Kazemi said. “It’s chaos. But then again, they have different ideas of what constitutes nudity in the West.”
Kazemi does see optimistic signs for Afghan women.
Nearly one-third of Afghan parliamentarians are women, equal rights are promised according to the 2004 constitution and more than one million girls have attended school. Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry in mid-January hired Jamila Bayaz as the country’s first female police chief. The ministry hopes to hire 10,000 female police recruits this year.
“I just want us to be able to have a conversation about women,” Kazemi said. “Not everyone will agree with me. But if we can agree to disagree and be civil, at least that’s progress.”
Kazemi plans to return to Afghanistan in several months to work on a documentary about the country’s film industry — even though she has received death threats delivered both through Facebook and Afghan newspapers.
“Some people have said I deserve to be killed, but I’m not afraid. I don’t go hanging out with people I don’t know. I know my rights, and have an enormous network of friends and supporters. And I’m careful.”
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