The Orphanage

Kabul at the end of the eighties. Qodrat is fourteen and sells cinema tickets on the black market, and his head is entirely in Bollywood films. After selling a ticket to a secret police officer by mistake he ends up in a Soviet run orphanage, where he gives false details at registration. Inside, life is friendships, a first love and getting into trouble, while outside the walls the country is changing and the civil war started by the mujahideen is coming closer. It is Shahrbanoo Sadat's second film and part of a planned sequence of five, all drawn from the unpublished diaries of her friend Anwar Hashimi. Hashimi plays the orphanage supervisor. Bollywood style musical sequences cut through it.