Parents' Guide to Bread & Roses

This documentary is sometimes a tense watch as women film their protests, activism, and lives in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. But the ways the three women in Bread & Roses fight against the new Taliban regime, with all its rules, limitations, and restrictions, is incredible, inspiring, and terrifying. One of the women even has her door burst open by angry kicks from Taliban soldiers, and she is quickly "arrested" and imprisoned. Other stories circulate of any woman activist being seen as a traitor and a "prostitute." Throughout all of this, it's easy to forget that everything we are seeing is shot by these women (or by the director, Sahra Mani) in some way or another, live, and while things play out. There is a certain sense of genuinely not knowing what is about to happen, as everything happening is always real-life, shot part-guerilla style, part-video-diary style.

Some might question the decision not to narrate this documentary, but others will find that this truly allows for the voices of these three women to be the primary presence in a film that is also largely about misogyny and social justice. There are also no breaks of information-, data-, or statistic-dumps to help articulate, say, the history and context of what is going on in Afghanistan before and after the Taliban's takeover. In many ways, this film is smart about highlighting and focusing on the stakes for these women and for all the women in Afghanistan who face the same. This focus inevitably casts a melancholy and at times bluntly sorrowful tone throughout everything, and it might make some viewers feel likewise somber and pensive. But bearing witness to the plights of all Afghan women yet to be liberated from a theocratic regime with antiquated views on women is the least one might do.