Writing Hawa - Expat Cinema Rotterdam
Miss seeing international films because you can’t yet keep up with the Dutch subtitles? Want to meet fellow expats and new Dutch folks? Love cinema? Then this is the event for you! Join Expat Cinema Rotterdam for the best international art house cinema with English subtitles.
Writing Hawa is a powerful portrait of three generations of Hazara women in Afghanistan, filmed over the course of five years. Director Najiba Noori turns her camera on her mother, Hawa, and her niece, Zahra, capturing with rare access and deep empathy their struggle to break free from patriarchal traditions.
Married off as a child, Hawa only learns to read and write at the age of 52. Together with her daughter, she opens a textile workshop that breathes new life into traditional Hazara embroidery. When she rescues her granddaughter Zahra from a violent household, they move to Kabul together to build a hopeful future. Their dreams are cruelly disrupted, however, by the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021. Zahra is forced to return to the village she had fled, and Najiba herself must leave Afghanistan. As a refugee in France, she continues to support her mother from afar.
Writing Hawa is an intimate, moving, and hopeful story about resilience, solidarity, and the strength of women who refuse to be broken.
- 19:00
Kies tijdstip
- filmspecial
Miss seeing international films because you can’t yet keep up with the Dutch subtitles? Want to meet fellow expats and new Dutch folks? Love cinema? Then this is the event for you! Join Expat Cinema Rotterdam for the best international art house cinema with English subtitles.
Writing Hawa is a powerful portrait of three generations of Hazara women in Afghanistan, filmed over the course of five years. Director Najiba Noori turns her camera on her mother, Hawa, and her niece, Zahra, capturing with rare access and deep empathy their struggle to break free from patriarchal traditions.
Married off as a child, Hawa only learns to read and write at the age of 52. Together with her daughter, she opens a textile workshop that breathes new life into traditional Hazara embroidery. When she rescues her granddaughter Zahra from a violent household, they move to Kabul together to build a hopeful future. Their dreams are cruelly disrupted, however, by the Taliban’s takeover in August 2021. Zahra is forced to return to the village she had fled, and Najiba herself must leave Afghanistan. As a refugee in France, she continues to support her mother from afar.
Writing Hawa is an intimate, moving, and hopeful story about resilience, solidarity, and the strength of women who refuse to be broken.
