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How Bollywood enters the story
Qodrat is 15 and sells cinema tickets on Kabul’s black market in the late 1980s. After he is sent to a Soviet-run orphanage, the children around him form a new social world. Bollywood enters through his imagination: he pictures himself inside the films he loves, making cinema both an escape and a way to frame the life unfolding around him.
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Sadat says she deliberately added Bollywood songs and used Bollywood-style cinematic grammar. In the Cannes press-kit interview, she explained: “Bollywood is a huge film industry in my part of the world and the friendship between Afghanistan and India has made it even stronger.” This is the director’s explanation of the films’ cultural place, not a quantified measure of Afghan viewing habits.
She also recalled that Kabul had cinemas in the 1980s. Describing a later viewing environment, she said people watched films online or bought DVDs on the black market. Those observations are Sadat’s account; the available film materials do not independently establish the present condition of Kabul cinemas.
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What the film adapts—and changes
The screenplay draws on memories and an unpublished diary by Hashimi, who Sadat says spent eight years in the orphanage. It is not a scene-by-scene documentary. Sadat describes shortening and fictionalizing the period, reducing the number of characters, and combining some stories and people to shape the material into a feature for audiences beyond Afghanistan while keeping Afghan viewers in mind.
Sadat says the fictionalized timeline begins in 1989 and ends with the Mujahideen taking over Kabul in 1992. She kept the timeline compressed so that the characters would not visibly age. The film therefore uses personal memories to approach a turbulent recent past while reshaping chronology and character for drama.
Rank #2
- Factory sealed DVD
As Sadat put it: “One can’t question the present if one doesn’t know the past.”
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The Orphanage is a 90-minute feature written and directed by Sadat. Its press kit lists Dari, Russian and Hindi-Urdu among its languages. Although the story is set in Kabul, filming took place in Tajikistan with non-professional Afghan actors; Sadat also described travel and visa difficulties during production.
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Rank #3
The film had its world premiere in the 2019 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. The Asia Pacific Screen Awards record lists it as a Best Youth Feature Film nominee and describes it as continuing the story thread begun in Sadat’s Wolf and Sheep (2016). These festival and cinema records establish its screening history, but do not establish current general availability to watch.
Quick Recap
Film details
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | The Orphanage (Parwareshgah) |
| Year and runtime | 2019; 90 minutes |
| Writer and director | Shahrbanoo Sadat |
| Languages listed in the press kit | Dari, Russian and Hindi-Urdu |
| Filming location | Tajikistan |
| Premiere | 2019 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight |
| Source material | Memories and an unpublished diary by Anwar Hashimi, adapted and fictionalized |
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