In 2021 the Taliban government took control of Afghanistan which brought in a desperate erosion of women’s rights in the country. This became the driving force behind the writing and direction of Elham Ehsas’ short film Yellow. Rather than focusing on the macro picture of injustice that women in Taliban controlled Afghanistan are living through, Ehsas instead dials into the specifics of a seemingly innocuous encounter between two people as they interact in a Kabul Chadari store where a young woman goes to buy her first full body veil, and through this humble human interaction, spotlights the limitations and oppression endured by women in the country. Following the film’s BAFTA nomination last week, we were able to sit down with Ehsas and speak to him about telling his female centric story from a man’s point of view, using close ups to place the audience into his protagonist’s perspective and feeling a pull as an artist to make a film which raises the awareness of the current plight of Afghan women.
[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]
It’s a pleasure to be speaking to you today as we really enjoyed your performance in Roxy Rezvany’s Photo Booth and you’re now here as a director and actor to speak about Yellow. Please tell us about the film’s premise.
Yellow is about a woman in Kabul who walks into a Chadari store to buy her first full-body veil, the burqa, that is synonymous with the Taliban and Afghanistan. She’s buying it at a time when the Taliban have come into power, and the future of women is unknown, that’s what the film hopes to deal with.
One thing that struck me is you are telling a woman’s story from the point of view of a man.
Well, it’s interesting because I got asked at a Q&A about this exact same thing where a woman had asked me, “How do you manage to write from the perspective of a woman so well?” and I said I didn’t. I wrote from the perspective of a man because as an Afghan man and as a man in general it pains me to see that our women, or women in general, are being oppressed. Their right to an education and freedom is being taken away from them. There are 20 million women in Afghanistan who have no access to education or basic human rights. As a man, I also feel that pain so I wrote it from the perspective of a man because I feel like there are brothers, fathers, and sons who feel that pain in Afghanistan and abroad.
I particularly love the moments of levity with the music and dancing which sit within such a heavy and serious subject matter.
I often find as a filmmaker that when you’re tackling such big issues in your films, you’re looking at such a huge mountain and the worst thing you can do is talk about that issue. I’m a big fan of taking little moments, little pieces of life, and pulling at them and dissecting them. You’ll find that in the smallest moments of life, a lot of the human condition is present. It doesn’t have to be on a grand or epic scale. Just take a little moment, a simple interaction between two people, in a shop for example and that will encompass everything that I want to talk about. It’s good to watch, it’s entertaining and not all doom and gloom. People in Afghanistan are funny, they are charming and they make a life out of what they have.
I’m a big fan of taking little moments, little pieces of life, and pulling at them and dissecting them.
These are two people who are bound by their own different, restrictive regimes and there’s almost an invisible wall between them. You’ve got the Taliban shopkeeper who’s bound by these doctrines and you’ve got the oppressed woman. But in another world, they could have been friends or lovers. There’s chemistry and they laugh together which juxtaposes against the backdrop of the position of women in Afghanistan now as second-class citizens. It’s just human interaction and if you go to the darkest places in the world and the most oppressed places in the world, there are still people who interact, it’s part of life. There are still jokes being thrown around and there’s still humour, wit and life. That nuance is quite interesting to me, which is what I tried to hone in on with Yellow.
I never would have guessed that the film’s interiors were shot in Hackney. How did you bring that authenticity to the location?
I’d been to Afghanistan a few months ago and I was looking around at the Chadari shops and I realised that they’re all quite small units with blue veils hanging down. I had bought some in Afghanistan with which to decorate the interior here in the UK which I actually ended up leaving at home the day of the shoot! We had a one day shoot and made the film for £3,000. With so many restrictions and budgetary constraints, we just had to find inventive ways to do it. We had to find creative ways to shoot it and use angles which didn’t give away that we didn’t have that much money.
What equipment and lighting did you have given that you were shooting in such a small space?
We had absolutely no lighting. The shop had its own ceiling lights that we just optimised and had a bounce and a black foil to direct the light from above. My DOP, Yiannis Manolopoulos, who I’ve collaborated with on many occasions, made it look beautiful. We were shooting on an Alexa with a minimal set up and only around eight people on set. It was a project of love.
You’ll find that in the smallest moments of life, a lot of the human condition is present. It doesn’t have to be on a grand or epic scale.
You tell this story with lots of wonderful close ups, what informed that framing decision?
I find that the shots that you use in your films are half of the story. They are a tool to help the viewer see the story from a certain perspective. If you have a scene where you use a different shot, it’ll have a different connotation, a different feeling if you use a different lens or or even a different production site. Everything is a choice, which is why sometimes being a director can be so difficult because everything you do is you inviting that choice in. I was very conscious of letting the audience into our protagonist Laili’s feelings at a certain point in the film and to let them in closer to try and be there with her. Especially with the last shot, where we are actually in the veil with her.
These are all choices I made to try and immerse the audience into this experience that women are having every day and have been having since 2021. There’s no education, there’s no freedom and I just can’t stand for that and as an artist, I needed to make something about it, which I have. In the final POV, it goes back to trying to put the audience into the shoes of an Afghan woman. I’ve watched my mom wear a Chadari and I wore one just to try and see what it’s like and you literally can’t see anything. Your peripheral vision doesn’t exist and you can’t see below you either so when you’re walking, you can’t see if there’s a stone or a pebble and you so you trip up a lot, it’s terrifying.
When I’m behind the camera, I can empathise with what the actors in front of me are experiencing and I am much more equipped to convey what is in my head.
You have the experience of being both in front of and behind the camera as an actor/director, how has your process developed through those dual roles?
I think it’s really interesting because it has helped me become all rounded in the sense that I can see both behind and in front of the camera. When I’m acting I can expect what behind the camera is expecting. And when I’m behind the camera, I can empathise with what the actors in front of me are experiencing and I am much more equipped to convey what is in my head. It has also allowed me to trust them to use their own craft and to open the floor to them as well. I trust them just as I would love a director to trust my own artistic instincts in front of the camera.
Yellow addresses such a huge and important subject matter, do you hope your BAFTA nomination will further highlight the lack of education and progression for women in Afghanistan?
It’s really interesting because the West has a very short term memory. I feel like Afghan women have slowly become more and more invisible from the news cycle and it’s almost as if they don’t exist in everyday news. My aim with this film is, and always has been, to shine a light on what’s happening back home to say this thing is still happening, these women still need our help. This is an opportunity for the international community, the political community to engage the Taliban and acknowledge they are trying to build a government and infrastructure for the country and if they want to be recognized by the international community for trade and communications tourism, they need to start recognising their own women. That’s what I hope comes out of this. I hope there’s a political dialogue between the government of Afghanistan and the wider community who have a responsibility to help those Afghan women.
Have you had any pushback about the film?
I have had some messages from people with different opinions and I’m open to that, but nothing on an official scale at the moment because the film hasn’t been released on a wider scale yet. Pushback is always a good thing because that means you’re doing something right. I hope that something positive comes out of this and there is a difference to Afghan women. Film changes lives, it changes times and it’s a great record of the times we live in.
Pushback is always a good thing because that means you’re doing something right.
It’s a shameful record right now that 20 million women are stranded at home. There were 3,000 doctors who were meant to join the Afghan National Health Service and the board examinations were cancelled. So that’s 3,000 doctors that aren’t in the system any more and are just at home doing nothing. That’s wasted potential for a country that needs all the help it can get after 40 years of war and counting. It’s a country where, in my lifetime, the flag has changed 19 times. In the 21st century, no other country has ever gone through that, there’s no stability.
Where are you focussing your efforts next?
I’m developing my short Our Kind of Love into a feature with the BFI who have been very kind and generous in helping support the development process. The BFI is such a great infrastructure in British cinema and I’m very lucky to have them on board to elevate the film and make it the best it can be. I’m also developing a short film called There Will Come Soft Rains about climate change. It’s about a girl who is so haunted by rising sea levels that she decides to dig up her dad’s grave and move him to higher ground. It relates to the premise that if you want to make a film about something, don’t make it about that thing. Especially if it’s a big thing like climate change. Make it about a little thing, which is what I try to do.
