Double Oscar nominee James Longley won the top award at the Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival on Saturday for his Afghanistan-set documentary 'Mohabat,' and told Variety at the Czech event that his next film will focus on the Rohingya genocide. Longley said he has already filmed the first act of that project, working with Diane Weyermann at Participant Media when the company was still operating. Weyermann died in 2021, and Participant shut down in 2024. He noted that next year marks the 10th anniversary of the 2017 genocide, which he said is formally recognized by the United States, the EU and the British government, yet no documentary feature has been produced on the subject. He added that he is uniquely prepared to make it.
'Mohabat' is set in Afghanistan and follows 12-year-old Mohabat as he tries to hold his family together under Taliban rule after a U.S. drone kills his father while he is out hunting. Longley said the killing happened during the first Trump administration, when Mike Pompeo was in charge of the drone program. He said such events were common during the 20-year war and that untold numbers of civilians were killed and forgotten far from foreign journalists in Kabul. Mohabat did not want his father to be forgotten and stayed with the team patiently through two years of filming, Longley said.
Longley said he arrived with a camera rather than a gun and was treated as a guest, not an enemy. He said he went with the sincere goal of telling Afghan stories, so he was accepted and given patience. He called it an honor to live and work alongside Afghan people, whom he described as brave and pure of heart in a way most Americans could learn from. He said he is not attempting to become Afghan but wants to help non-Afghans understand Afghanistan better, adding that after a 20-year war this seemed like the least outsiders could do.
During location scouting, the team visited orphanages filled with children who had lost their parents in the war. Longley said the sons of Afghan policemen killed in Taliban suicide bombings shared their bread with the sons of killed Taliban fighters, and many of the children wanted to tell their stories. He said Mohabat believed the film would do justice to the memory of his father, a poor man with a wife and seven children who worked as a tea seller in a large market on the edge of Kabul. Longley also recalled that Mohabat's friend Elham told the team he had been waiting for a foreign journalist to come and ask about what they had seen during the war and what they thought about it.
Longley said he is drawn to making films about young people and for young people, citing 'Iraq in Fragments,' 'Angels Are Made of Light' and now 'Mohabat.' He argued that children experience the world most directly and for the first time, and that when he shows a documentary set in Afghanistan, Iraq or Gaza to a Western audience, those viewers are like a child in those countries, encountering something new. He cited Vittorio De Sica, Abbas Kiarostami, Majid Majidi and François Truffaut as directors who treat the lives of child characters with great seriousness, and said that approach can work in documentaries too. He said making a film in Afghanistan with a child as the main protagonist, whether during the war or under the Taliban, made the job easier because permission for a film about a child is far easier to obtain than permission for one about an adult.
He was not able to film women. Longley said it would have caused a local scandal if one of the village women had appeared in the film and that she would never have been able to live it down. He said the issue was less whether women can talk than that their neighbors would never stop talking about it. He noted that many Afghan women are making their own films in secret on their iPhones and said he did not feel it was necessary to duplicate their efforts. He added that he was in no position to make a film about Afghan women, while Afghan women filmmakers were in no position to make the kind of film he made in 'Mohabat.'
Alex Gibney is credited as a producer alongside Longley and Mohammad Sharif Hotak. Longley said Gibney saw 'Angels Are Made of Light,' liked it and immediately agreed when Longley asked him to produce a film about life in Afghanistan under the Taliban. He called Gibney the best documentary producer alive and a deeply intelligent person, and said the collaboration and level of trust were a dream for any filmmaker. He also praised Hotak, who lived just down the road from the villages where they filmed, saying his familiarity with the place and the people was the key to making the movie and that Hotak grew up experiencing the same realities of war as the children in the film.
Longley said finding a personal angle is crucial regardless of where he is heading. He described all films and media as reflecting the politics around which they were made and the politics of those who made them. He said corporate news media produce work aligned with the politics of their owners and advertisers, while his films reflect his own pro-human and anti-war politics. He said he suspects his films are in direct conflict with almost everything seen on television but could not say for sure because he has never owned a TV, and that he does not care what most of those people have to say.
Sources: Variety.