This review originally ran Sept. 9, 2022, in conjunction with the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“In Her Hands” starts at the end: Tanks rolling into Kabul, frantic packing, and Maidan Shahr mayor, Zarifa Ghafari, sitting in the footwell of a car, shielding her head from the window as she flees Afghanistan amid the Taliban’s rise to power in the spring of 2021. How did this happen? What will Ghafari do?
These are the questions Marcel Mettelsiefen & Tamana Azazi, documentarians, pose.“Watani: My Homeland”) hope to answer – if only their documentary, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival on its way to Netflix, weren’t hobbled by a lack of viable footage and genuine moments.
Its startling beginnings led to its terrifying end. “In Her Hands” slips into telling rather than showing, a 90-minute campaign ad for Ghafari’s future political and social activism rather than a story that occurs in the present.
Ghafari is a very likable person to her credit. She was born in 1992 and is the youngest Afghan female mayor. Her responsibility included representing one of the most conservative parts of Afghanistan with Taliban-run territory bordering directly against her. At any point in time, a violent threat could and would uproot her life; she’d have to move, change staff and travel with armed bodyguards.
Ghafari, a smart and educated leader who advocates for education for Afghan women, is very proud of her accomplishments. She’s funny, too, and kind to her staff. Her bed is covered with stuffed animals, and she has a loving, warm relationship with her fiancé and now husband Bashir Mohammadi.
“In Her Hands” is full of arresting footage: Ghafari’s scarred hands clutching her cell phone, riding in the backseat of a car in which her driver Massoum holds a gun in his lap as he makes a turn. Often, Ghafari’s job requires her to drive through Taliban-ruled territory, where any stopped car or traffic jam or suspicious gathering could be the source of another attack. Through all of this, she is positive and forward-thinking, eager to move past the Taliban’s threats on her life and to get her job done. Only, “In Her Hands”Ghafari seems to be quite uninterested in what it’s all about DoesYou can rely on her to use more dynamic, though repetitive scenes in which she has to confront the danger in life.
Much attention has been paid to Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s executive-producing role in the film, a fitting match for a documentary on a female politician struggling against the status quo. Ghafari rages against the system in question, but one glance at her office and her peers, and it’s easy to see that her staff consists of mostly men. Who knows what kind of hiring restrictions were put into place on Ghafari’s office, but despite her claims of wanting to elevate women, we see little of her doing that, minus helping out beggars in the street. More weight is given to Ghafari’s international travels, a speech she gives in Washington, D.C. to ask for the United States’ help as the American military gears up to leave.
As the film’s tensions heighten, it becomes clear that impending danger will force Ghafari to make the choice between protecting her immediate family and standing by her people. This is a difficult choice, one made with tears and discomfort, but Ghafari’s lack of class (or even worker) solidarity and her willingness to flee in the nigh call into question much of what she stands for in the first half of the documentary.
It would be one, if “In Her Hands”The group was prepared to make some mistakes and explore the ways that leadership closes off a circle of compassion-giving people. But Ghafari’s eventual escape from Kabul as the city falls into the hands of the Taliban is perpetrated with relative disregard for those among her — one of the stickier, more uncomfortable bits of the U.S. departure, as well.
While the film portrays women as a two-syllable concept and word, it does not offer any insight into how Afghani women can improve their situation. Ghafari, while sympathetic, may be a worthy representation of someone in power rendered equally useless due to the system. However, the documentary is so outsiderly focused and intended for Western audiences that it barely exceeds the nature a Wikipedia page.
There’s a scene late in the documentary in which it is implied that Ghafari is corrupt, or that her position was acquired dishonestly; though the documentary chooses not to entertain this notion, it’s a criticism worth pressing, to see why and how people have come to think this way about her. The more it focuses on Ghafari’s positive energy and frustrated tears, the more it’s easy to believe there’s something else we’re not seeing.
Although the film attempts to end on a hopeful note in vain, the truth is that Ghafari had the ability and the means to leave Afghanistan. Many others didn’t. Her solution to the problem is frustratingly opaque, focusing on women’s labor and a bootstraps mentality that contradicts much of what she says earlier in the film. “In Her Hands” can ultimately neither endorse nor neglect Ghafari’s contributions to Afghanistan, in part because it’s just too soon to know what difference, if any, she was able to make.
“In Her Hands”The film will be released in US theaters on November 11, before it is distributed globally via Netflix on November 16.