亞洲視野競賽

Filmed over five years, this film follows three generations of Hazara women in Afghanistan. Forced into marriage as a child, Hawa learns to read at 52 and starts a textile business, while her daughter Najiba and granddaughter Zahra seek independence. The Taliban’s return in 2021 shatters their fragile progress, forcing separation, exile and renewed struggle. Najiba Noori: ‘War, violence, forced marriage, and lack of access to education have plagued and victimised countless Afghan women for decades. My mother’s dreams were stolen.

A Dutch-Afghan filmmaker confronts his authoritarian father, an imam with a violent past, in an attempt to heal their fractured relationship. Travelling across Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, they reflect on family, faith and displacement. Part personal reckoning, part universal search for freedom, the film explores liberation from inherited fear and emotional exile.

In rural India, a son challenges corrupt officials while his mother works their poppy farm. As authorities retaliate against their lower-caste family, survival collides with resistance. Filmed over five years, I, Poppy traces diverging moral paths, revealing the human cost of choosing between daily survival and the pursuit of justice.

In Osaka’s Nishinari Ward, Kamagasaki remains a historic enclave of day labourers, though its name no longer appears on official maps. As public spaces disappear, the director and his friend wander its streets, listening to residents’ voices. Their stories reveal lives shaped by hardship, solidarity, and a neighbourhood that continues to shelter society’s most marginalised.

The webcam witnesses it all. Living in Berlin, the director records ten years of drifting online conversations with parents in Isfahan and a cousin in Vienna. Much remains unsaid. Text fragments and VHS images evoke longing, distance and the ache of wanting to be understood.

Faraz Fesharaki: ‘My mother wanted to know why I was recording our Skype conversations. I told her these recordings were like my diaries. [In writing,] I would never have been able to capture the essence of those moments with such detail and fidelity.