Later, when Sadat started to work on the film, the second in the series of films based on the unpublished diaries of Anwar Hashimi, she decided to view them all—from Raj Kapoor to Big B all the way to Shah Rukh Khan movies. “So, I think I ended up watching 400 films,” she said. At times some of those were without subtitles. But she found the plots simple and language easy to understand, a lot of words quite like those in Persian.The recording of that interaction with Sadat, which curiously never took the form of a print article, reached out to me as I read about the fall of Kabul and Sadat managing to flee from Kabul to Paris, in a long drawn, tension filled operation worthy of a Bollywood film itself. I listened to the recording yet again with Bollywood continuing to be in the eye of the storm, all its power and glory being reduced to dust, even as it has brought, and continues to bring, joy amidst hopelessness to many unknown lives. Even amidst unimaginable violence, tumult and trauma.So, in The Orphanage, Bollywood is movingly shown as an escape from penury and privation for the waifs. Sadat spoke about Afghans not being very expressive. “You look at their faces and you cannot really see if they’re happy or sad. You cannot really know what’s going on in their head. And then there is this contrast in their love for Bollywood. Be it love, anger, revenge or fight; everyone is experiencing emotions in a very extreme high level in those films,” she said. What makes the over-the-top melodrama in our films work for the Afghans for real? At least it did work back in 2019. “They don’t really have any interest in seeing their everyday life [on screen]… But what they would love to see is something that is not real. Something that would reorient reality,” she said.Besides Big B and SRK, Sadat spoke about the takeover by another Indian superstar. “There is this guy whose name I don’t remember. He is not from Bollywood but from the other big industry out there… He’s punching one guy and then 20 people are flying… He puts a cigarette and then he lights it up with a gun,” she said. Who else but Thalaiva Rajinikanth!In The Orphanage, Qodratollah is shown black-marketing tickets of Big B’s Shahenshah at the Cinema Shahr theatre in Kabul. I was informed of three surviving cinema theatres in Kabul back in 2019. Spaces that women didn’t go to. It wasn’t as though those women were not allowed but the crowd was too rough and unpleasant to handle.
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