Kabul, Between Prayers

Aboozar Amini The Netherlands, Belgium 2025 102 min.

Who are the Taliban supporters living in Afghanistan? An unprecedented glimpse into the life of Samim, a devoted soldier of the Taliban ideology, who struggles between the seductive promise of martyrdom and the mundanity of his existence. His 14-year-old brother Rafi looks up to him as he slowly but surely leaves behind the playfulness of adolescence on the inevitable path to becoming a religious soldier who loves war above all else.

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In 2019, director Aboozar Amini presented Kabul, City in the Wind at DOCVILLE, following a bus driver along his route through Kabul for three years. Amini himself belongs to an ethnic group persecuted by the Taliban and fled to the Netherlands at the age of fourteen. Yet in Kabul, Between Prayers, he does not portray two brothers steeped in Taliban ideology as monsters, but as individuals shaped by their environment.

This observant,non-judgmental approach is both unsettling and compelling, especially in the portrait of the younger brother: a smiling boy who plays tag, yet simultaneously learns to shoot and recites verses about unbelievers burning in hell. In the world of Kabul, Between Prayers, these are not contradictions but the disturbing daily reality of Afghanistan under Taliban rule.