Bread & Roses, a new Apple TV+ documentary film whose backers include actress Jennifer Lawrence, is partly a story about the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021. That’s a catastrophe I wrote about as it was unfolding for Forbes — specifically, from the perspective of journalists who were both reporting on the ground and forced to flee the advance of the Taliban in real-time. All of it, of course, a consequence of the Biden administration’s abrupt and hastily executed withdrawal from the country, which turned into an unmitigated military and humanitarian disaster.
One journalist I interviewed literally as the city was falling — a writer for Le Monde who’d been covering Afghanistan for several years — sent me voice memos in lieu of texts as she scanned the departures screen at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. The Taliban were mere miles from the outskirts of the city. A local journalist I’d started texting back-and-forth with eventually went quiet, and I had no idea if he’d made it onto one of the US military’s flights filled with evacuees, until he sent me a photo from inside what looked a plane’s cargo bay with a mass of his countrymen huddled around him.
The new Apple TV+ film, which was executive produced by Malala Yousafzai and is now streaming on the platform, picks up the story of what happened after all those journalists left and tens of thousands of refugees fled. It sheds light on what happened to women there, after a free press was no longer allowed to thrive.
Bread & Roses, Apple explains, “offers a powerful window into the seismic impact on women’s rights and livelihoods after Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021. The documentary film follows three women in real time as they fight to recover their autonomy. Director Sahra Mani captures the spirit and resilience of Afghan women through a raw depiction of their harrowing plight.”
Bread & Roses is debuting on Apple TV+ with a perfect 100% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the only appropriate score for this powerful film that focuses on what happened after the Taliban re-established Islamic rule in Afghanistan and the mobility, education, and employment of women were quickly curtailed. The film is composed exclusively of footage that was sent in to director Sahra Mani from people on the ground, and the women it follows during the first year of renewed Taliban control include former government worker Sharifeh, who’s uncomfortably now being stuck at home under the new regime.
Other women the Apple film focuses on include a dentist named Zahra, whose practice doubles as a secret base for activists. In the streets, women demand work, bread and education. “May history remember that once upon a time, such cruelty was permitted against the women of Afghanistan,” one documentary participant laments.