Bread and Roses

[lawrencepedia]

Without anyone knowing, Jennifer and Justine, via Excellent Cadaver, has produced a documentary that is headed to Cannes Film Festival! 
https://deadline.com/2023/04/cannes-afgh...235334532/

Afghan director Sahra Mani’s documentary Bread and Roses, capturing the experiences of Afghan women living under the Taliban since they took control of Kabul in 2021, was announced for its Official Selection on Monday.
The film will screen as a Special Screening in the festival.
The arrival of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement in power has had a catastrophic impact on women’s rights, which had been slowly advancing, stripping them of access to education, employment and public spaces.


Bread And Roses is described as an unpoliticized tale of resilience as well as “a raw, un-sanitized depiction of the female plight in Afghanistan.”
The film follows three women, desperate to recover their autonomy, who largely tell their stories through their own lenses.
Jennifer Lawrence and Justine Ciarrocchi produce under the banner of their company Excellent Cadaver, with Mani also taking producer credits. Executive producers are Farhad Khosravi and The Eyan Foundation.
It marks Excellent Cadaver’s third production, after Causeway and the upcoming comedy No Hard Feelings, and its first documentary.
Like many cinema professionals and artists, Mani fled Afghanistan when the Taliban took power in the summer of 2021 and is living now in Europe.
Her previous credits include the 2019 documentary A Thousand Girls Like Me about a young Afgan woman who seeks justice after having been sexually abused by her father for years, which played at HotDocs, Sheffield and IDFA.
At the time of the fall of Kabul, Mani was also working on the long-gestated documentary Kabul Melody about a pioneering music school in the Afghan capital where boys and girls studied together, which she then had to rethink following its destruction by the Taliban.The Cannes Film Festival has a long tradition of showing films about world events and this year is no exception.
Afghan director Sahra Mani’s documentary Bread and Roses, capturing the experiences of Afghan women living under the Taliban since they took control of Kabul in 2021, was announced for its Official Selection on Monday.
The film will screen as a Special Screening in the festival.
The arrival of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement in power has had a catastrophic impact on women’s rights, which had been slowly advancing, stripping them of access to education, employment and public spaces.


Women have also borne the brunt of the deteriorating economy under Taliban rule, which has left many families unable to afford basic necessities.
Bread And Roses is described as an unpoliticized tale of resilience as well as “a raw, un-sanitized depiction of the female plight in Afghanistan.”
The film follows three women, desperate to recover their autonomy, who largely tell their stories through their own lenses.
Jennifer Lawrence and Justine Ciarrocchi produce under the banner of their company Excellent Cadaver, with Mani also taking producer credits. Executive producers are Farhad Khosravi and The Eyan Foundation.
It marks Excellent Cadaver’s third production, after Causeway and the upcoming comedy No Hard Feelings, and its first documentary.
Like many cinema professionals and artists, Mani fled Afghanistan when the Taliban took power in the summer of 2021 and is living now in Europe.
Her previous credits include the 2019 documentary A Thousand Girls Like Me about a young Afgan woman who seeks justice after having been sexually abused by her father for years, which played at HotDocs, Sheffield and IDFA.
At the time of the fall of Kabul, Mani was also working on the long-gestated documentary Kabul Melody about a pioneering music school in the Afghan capital where boys and girls studied together, which she then had to rethink following its destruction by the Taliban."

[lawssance]

First Oscar nom for producing? 

[Betty]

It took us by surprise because we have not heard about the project before it announced today. I agree it will more likely get Oscar nomination. Also, after the cannas festival it gone be released in once of streaming services.

[priyanka969]

This is SO cool!  

Is it too much to hope that she attends Cannes now?

ETA - The fckn article says she is going.   I am not hoping for an Oscar nom yet but if she got one, then yesssss JUSTICE FOR CAUSEWAY AND MOTHER!

[lawrencepedia]

Makes sense that she'd be doing. Just her being there will lend the project some much needed attention. And it's a pretty easy gig for her. Go, take some pics, do some interviews and just give the documentary some focus.

[lawssance]

https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/bread-and-roses/

Bread and Roses offers a powerful window into the seismic impact on women’s rights and livelihoods after Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021. The film follows three women, in real time, as they fight to recover their autonomy. Mani captures the spirit and resilience of Afghan women through her raw, intimate depiction of their harrowing plight.

[lawssance]

She is in Cannes ladies and homos 

[lawssance]

Kate Young and Hung Vanngo are also there.

[priyanka969]

This documentary is bar none the most impressive thing she's ever done in her career. It came totally out of left field and I'm just so impressed that they managed to put something like this together. I hope it ends up on Netflix where the most eyes will be able to see it.

[lawrencepedia]

Well, she's been looking utterly fabulous today! 
First dress suited the occasion perfectly. And the red custom Dior? Amazing. 

And, with this being the second event Jamie Mizrahi has styled Jen for, I think we can safely say that she's no longer with Kate Young. Short little stint she had with her, but for whatever reason she decided to start working with Jamie instead. So far, so GREAT! 

[priyanka969]

‘Bread And Roses’: Cannes Review

Jennifer Lawrence-backed doc reveals a powerful resistance against the Taliban amongst Afghan women

The fall of Kabul in August 2021 returned Afghanistan to the grip of Taliban rule. Sahra Mani’s documentary Bread And Roses uses the experiences of three Afghanistan women to convey the devastating wider impact on the lives of women facing the loss of basic rights. Mani previously directed A Thousand Girls Like Me (2018) which told the story of a young Afghan woman seeking to expose the abuse within her family and the failings of the country’s judicial system, and her latest work confirms her ability to illustrate big themes through the emotional experiences of individuals. Here, personal tales help illuminate the national story in a work of powerful, poignant testimony that should attract documentary channels and streamers. The backing of Jennifer Lawrence’s production company Excellent Cadaver could help boost the film’s profile following a Cannes world premiere.

read And Roses starts by depicting what had become normal life in Kabul. A busy market is filled with produce and customers. Carefree children play together. A beautiful woman walks the streets in colourful attire. Mani makes the notion of this being the calm before the storm quite literal with a rumble of thunder on the soundtrack and a lightning strike. Masoud Sekhavat Doust’s plaintive score also introduces a sense of melodrama into a documentary that otherwise allows the women and their stories to speak for themselves.

We are then introduced to the three women who form the core of the film. Zahra Mohammadi is a dentist who has just celebrated her engagement to Omid. Taranom Seyedi is an activist. Sharifa Movahidzadeh has been working as a government employee and is now required to stay at home. All of them have a slightly different response to what is happening in Afghanistan, but ultimately find themselves on the same path of resistance and potential exile.

The video diaries of these women provide a valuable record of what daily life was like in the initial months of the Taliban regime. Outrage at the way women are treated results in street protests that are met with beatings, tear gas and arrest. There is a sense of disbelief that the right to an education, to work and to live an independent life can all be snatched away in an instant. Mani’s own filming captures a sense of a surface normality concealing a world that has been turned upside down. The market is still open, some children play and the seasons still change through a snow-dusted winter and the blossom of spring. Kabul is a beautiful city in which ugly oppression is unfolding.

We are reminded throughout of the dangers in bearing witness to what is happening. Journalists and photographers are beaten. People can “disappear” once they are arrested. Resistance takes many forms. In one scene, Sharifa stands at her widow, the sun shining on her exposed face as she listens to music. It is a moment of normality, entirely forbidden under Taliban rule.

The video dairies allow us privileged access to the women as Zahra becomes a leading activist, Taranom suffers the pain of exile in Pakistan and Sharifa is slowly radicalised. Initially accepting that she can no longer work and must stay at home, she later risks her life with clandestine acts of protest.

Despite everything that happens in Afghanistan, the women remain filled with hope for the future. Chants of “Work, Bread and Education” are still heard in the streets. Angry young children hold a promise for the future. We hear the defiant belief that the next President of Afghanistan will be a woman. Bread And Roses conveys the full nightmare of what has happened to women in Afghanistan, but it becomes a celebration of resistance rather than a lament for what has been lost.

[priyanka969]

[lawssance]

Oh Jennifer Lawrence, the star you are…

[Betty]

I love that Jennifer Lawrence walked the red carpet at Cannes in flip-flops. Apparently it not allowed in cannas which is ridiculous. It been a while since she wore red color it look good on her same with Justin. 

[lawrencepedia]

She had heels on at first. So she switched at some point. haha 

[priyanka969]

I'm going to just keep adding tweets because she is the prettiest 

[lostindc]

She looks just incredible in that red dress.  Such a nice surprise, I hope this documentary is a real success for her, and in some small way helps the women of Afghanistan.

[priyanka969]

Variety | ‘Bread and Roses’ Review: Righteously Angry Doc Draws Attention to Human Rights Abuses

Produced by Jennifer Lawrence, Sahra Mani’s documentary follows the lives of three people fighting to recover basic rights stripped from them following the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul in 2021.

Afghan director Sahra Mani‘s well-received “A Thousand Girls Like Me” documented the quest for justice of a young incest victim, and now, Mani has returned with a similarly hard-hitting documentary, “Bread and Roses”, premiering in the official selection of Cannes as a special screening. Produced by Jennifer Lawrence, this film tackles an urgent and timely topic through a committed on-the-ground perspective, capturing the experience of three people, Zahra, Taranom and Sharifa, whose lives as they knew them were effectively ended when the Taliban seized control of Kabul in 2021.

The film benefits from introducing a voice-of-god narrator or viewer stand-in to guide the audience through an arm’s-length survey of the situation. This is scrappy, up-close and personal filmmaking — which is not to say that anything here is hard to follow or purposefully obscure. It’s more that Mani trusts both her audience and subjects to engage with the actuality of what is happening without the need for intrusive formatting.

The overarching context for the film is an exploration of what has happened to people’s lives since the Taliban took control of Kabul in 2021, and the progress of brave but under-resourced attempts to fight back. Since 2021, huge numbers of schools have been closed, hundreds of doctors, dentists, teachers and other professionals have been banned from working or going to gyms or parks, thousands of people live under effective house arrest, forbidden to leave their homes by themselves. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the wider world might care a bit more about these human rights abuses if so many of the nightmarish restrictions weren’t overwhelmingly targeted at women.

Perhaps part of the reason for this lack of ongoing international outrage is the widespread misapprehension that women’s rights in Afghanistan have not historically changed very much. In fact, women in Afghanistan won the right to vote one year before women in the U.S., in 1919. The women featured in Mani’s documentary are not mourning rights they never had. They all come across as living in shock, expressed differently according to their different personalities, at the brutal and shockingly swift change in their circumstances.

What is exciting about this film is the time it takes to show the energy, courage and sheer strength of the women who make up the resistance in Afghanistan, necessary in a film that could otherwise be relentlessly bleak. These women risk their lives to protest a regime that doesn’t see them as fully human. The stark societal binary imposed here by the Taliban is very clear. You are either a good woman (and there are only two types of those: well-behaved virgins and dutiful mothers) or a bad woman — and if the latter, you are sub-human and have forfeited all your rights.

Perhaps most heartbreaking of all is a section of the film where young elementary and middle school girls chant that they want the Taliban to go away, knowing that unless something changes in the next 5-10 years that their likely prospects are limited to compulsory housework and marriage, with no education, and not even the ability to walk in a public park unaccompanied.

This film is a necessary howl of rage, one that argues cogently — via the simple expedient of capturing life as it is lived — that to ignore what it happening in Afghanistan is to condemn half the population of the country to oppression under a dictatorship that is both political and personal.

[priyanka969]

Deadline | ‘Bread And Roses’ Review: Cannes Doc Directed By Sahra Mani, Produced By Jennifer Lawrence, Shows Bleak Reality For Afghan Women Under Taliban

Late last month the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to condemn the Taliban for systematically depriving Afghan women of their rights, demanding the country’s fundamentalist Islamic rulers provide “full, equal, meaningful and safe participation of women and girls” in Afghan society.

It was an acknowledgement of how quickly the situation for women and girls has deteriorated since the Taliban retook control of Kabul in August 2021, following the departure of U.S. military forces. The dire reality for the distaff population of Afghanistan becomes heartbreakingly clear in the documentary Bread and Roses, which premiered today at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is directed by Afghan native Sahra Mani and produced by actress Jennifer Lawrence, Justine Ciarrochi, and Mani.

“Do not forget about Afghan women!” Dr. Zahra Mohammadi implored the audience at the Salle Agnès Varda in Cannes as she, Mani and Lawrence introduced the film. Before the Taliban takeover, Dr. Mohammadi operated a thriving dental practice in Kabul, but soon after the Taliban return to power she was ordered to remove her name from her own clinic. Women across the country were told they could no longer go out in public without a male escort; schools for girls and women were shut down.

The documentary includes cell phone video of brave women who defied the stay-at-home order and protested in the streets, calling on authorities to re-open schools. “Down with the terrorists!” shout some of the demonstrators, clearly meaning the Taliban. Disturbing videos show the brutal reaction of security forces who attack protestors and what appear to be Western journalists trying to cover the demonstrations.

In another cell phone video, a man off camera is heard threatening to summarily execute women protestors. One of the women tells him flatly, “You’re desperate for power over us.” That sums up the grim situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, guided by an extreme interpretation of the Quran, is obsessed with subjugating more than half of its people.

In what could be considered a ray of hope – perhaps a very faint one – Bread and Roses shows safe houses where some women are offered shelter, at least temporarily, as they try to get to Pakistan to escape the suffocation of their freedoms. And some men of a more enlightened nature make stray appearances, including Zahra’s devoted husband, Omid, and the husband of another key woman in the film who notes succinctly at one point, “In Afghanistan, women are slaves.”

One of the most harrowing cell phone videos comes from an anguished woman who speaks into the camera, saying through tears, “I have a Talib living in my house.” That’s a reference to her husband, whom she says has administered terrible beatings on her, worse even than what she would experience were she to venture unescorted into the streets.

The film unfolds in a fractured narrative, jumping between several different women who are faced with the prospect of having to flee their homeland. It coheres around Zahra, a charismatic woman who grew up in a conservative family (at one point her father is heard telling her he strongly disapproves of her growing activism and that as a result of her high profile he can no longer go out in public himself. He sounds like the embodiment of male privilege and self-pity). Despite the disapproval of her family and great risk involved, Zahra convenes meetings in her dental office where women discuss their plight and write out protest slogans to display during public demonstrations. In one scene, Zahra tells her young nieces that if they are questioned about her they should deny knowing their aunt.

The film rises to an even greater level of tension when Zahra is arrested by authorities, leaving family and friends wondering if they will ever see her alive. She is later released (the film doesn’t explain under what circumstances), but she recounts torture that she and other detainees endured while in detention. She says one woman with whom she was incarcerated had been beaten so badly Zahra didn’t recognize her, only realizing later that they had known each other before.

Mani, the filmmaker, directed an earlier film about women in Afghanistan, A Thousand Girls Like Me, released in 2018 before the final Taliban onslaught. During his introduction of the cast, Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux noted that Mani is living in exile in Iran (a place not exactly known for treasuring women’s rights either, but one where women have taken a leading role demonstrating for an end to domination of society by Islamist clerics). Frémaux saluted Mani for creating a film that he said serves as both a contemporary witness of Afghanistan, and a witness for history.

Lawrence and Ciarrocchi produced the film through their banner Excellent Cadaver, and it’s the company’s first documentary. Bread and Roses is eligible for the L’Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) award, which goes to the top documentary in the Cannes Film Festival. The L’Oeil d’or jury attended the premiere screening (earning a shoutout from Frémaux), and afterwards the jury president, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, could be seen wiping tears from her eyes.

Whether a documentary about women in Afghanistan can effect any change in the country seems too much to hope for. But at the very least, as Dr. Mohammadi urged, it will help ensure their ordeal is not forgotten.

[lawrencepedia]

https://variety.com/2023/film/news/jenni...235620690/

Jennifer Lawrence Produced ‘Bread and Roses’ After Feeling ‘Helpless and Frustrated’ for Suppressed Afghan Women

Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and her producing partner Justine Ciarrocchi touched down at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday to promote their label’s first ever documentary feature, “Bread and Roses” — a harrowing and emotional look at the lives of women in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
The nation fell once again to the insurgent group, which moved quickly to strip women of basic rights — simple freedoms like the ability to work, appear in public without a male chaperone and receive an education. 
“I was watching this from America, where Roe v. Wade was about to be overturned. We felt helpless and frustrated with how to get these stories off of the news cycle and into people’s psyches. To help people be galvanized and care about the plight of these women.”

In the infancy of building their production company Excellent Cadaver, Lawrence and Ciarrocchi pursued Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani (“A Thousand Girls Like Me”) to help capture the stories of the suppressed women on the ground. The finished film, which was received with tears at its world premiere on the Croisette, is comprised largely of video filmed by its three subjects. Crews could not safely enter Afghanistan, nor could Mani, who had been abroad working when the Taliban took the country back.
“The director was given footage from women using their cell phones, there was one trusted camera person that was used occasionally,” Lawrence said. Ciarrocchi recalled the high stress of protecting Mani and the subjects from retaliation.
“Sahra had been out of Kabul for about a month by the time it fell, she was in France. The great news now is that all of our protagonists are safely out of Afghanistan. We wanted to make sure that these women were safe and that we were being thoughtful, while also trying to shape a film. That was a wild set of responsibilities for us, and a very new experience,” said Ciarrocchi.
Financing was pieced together on the fly, the producers said, but singular images from the struggle of these women kept them motivated. Lawrence said that watching the children these women raise get tased in the street for protesting was “devastating to watch as a mother. You just want to do anything you can to change it.”
Lawrence and Ciarrocchi also observed an unsettling side effect from the footage of women living in lockdown — psychological damage from restrictions around leaving the house.

“One of our protagonists, Sharifa, we had to witness the tedium of her life. How it would feel to be a woman who is in the workplace and enjoying freedom in her city with her friends — to witness her cabin fever was painful,” Ciarrocchi said.
Another central character, a successful dentist forced to give up her practice under the Taliban, gave Lawrence a new appreciation for her own liberties.
“It makes me think about when I was little, how much I hated going to school. We take for granted that education is a way out for these women. [Our subject] had all of that stripped away and can’t even go outside without a chaperone. It’s a right to have as a human, to have something to do every day and be productive in society,” she said.
“Bread and Roses” is currently for sale out of the Cannes film market. Lawrence and her partner are hopeful the film will receive worldwide distribution, warning that its themes are more relevant than one would suspect in places like America.
“There is not much separating us from these other countries,” said Lawrence. “Democracy is all we have. and it’s sliding back. We have to keep our eye on the ball, which is individual freedoms.”

They also did a Deadline Cannes Studio with the director, Sara Mani: https://deadline.com/video/jennifer-lawr...ni-cannes/