FINDING HOME IN A DAYDREAM Shahrbanoo Sadat’s The Orphanage and Afghan Storytelling
Shahrbanoo Sadat was born in Tehran in 1990, but she’s not Iranian. For the first eleven years of her life, she had no official national identity. The child of Afghan immigrants – who’d left Afghanistan after it was invaded by Soviet troops in 1979 – Sadat lived in a country that wouldn’t grant her a passport and never made her feel at home. After the American war on Afghanistan deposed the Taliban government in late 2001, there was suddenly a strong, concerted push to have Afghan expats ‘return home’. ‘The Iranian government produced an enormous propaganda campaign through the media,’ Sadat would recall years on. ‘[T]hey put on a lot of pressure. They kicked my father out from the factory that he was working in and [my] school denied to accept me’.1 So Sadat’s father moved the family back to where he’d grown up: an isolated, impoverished rural village in central Afghanistan. With Sadat having spent her whole life living in urban Tehran, she didn’t speak a word of Hazaragi, the local language. ‘My father took me to a village with 10 houses and less than 100 people living in the middle of nowhere,’ Sadat recounts. ‘There was no electricity, no water, no signal for phones, no internet of course, nothing there at all […] Suddenly we had a flock of sheep, we had cows and chickens.’2
This is not a familiar origin story for a filmmaker, especially after you learn that, when Sadat finally left the village to go to university in Kabul, it was to train in physics. But, in the Afghan capital, Sadat ended up signing on to study documentary filmmaking with Atelier Varan Kabul,
