In July the British Council, in partnership with the Goethe Institute and the French Cultural Centre, supported the 4th Kabul International Documentary and Short Film Festival.

The festival showcased over 50 films, of which half were from Afghanistan and half from the UK, Germany, France, Spain, India, Pakistan and Iran. The programme included four award winning UK documentaries - Garbage Warrior (Oliver Hodge); Black Sun (Gary Tarn); The Biggest Chinese Restaurant In the World (Weijun Chen) and Touching the Void (Kevin McDonald).

The British Council has been slowly building up film activites in Afghanistan over the past few years. In 2006 the Kabul office supported screenings of acclaimed film maker Philip Grabsky’s The Boy Who Played on the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

2007 saw Film Department in the UK hosted a UK visit for Engineer Ahmed Latif (one of Afghanistan's most respected film directors, who is also head of the Kabul film festival) and fellow film maker Timor Shah Hakimyar. The trip included meetings with key contacts to get an overview of the current UK film scene, plus a stint at the Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol to understand the mechanics of organising an international film event.

Energised and brimming with enthusiasm following their UK visit, the pair sited script development and digital film making as priority training needs, so in 2008 we arranged for Jawed Taiman from UK based production company Film Fx Zone Ltd to run a series of seminars for 60 Afghan film makers at Kabul University, covering a range of topics including script writing, cinematography, production design, documentary film-making and video journalism.

‘Cinema, at its best, remains the most powerful cultural medium of them all’ said Lord David Puttnam during his keynote speech at the 2009 Edinburgh Film Festival. The sentiment is echoed by Engineer Latif:

‘Beyond providing audiences with good quality cinema, there is, however, a bigger goal: by inviting film-makers from Pakistan, Iran, India and Tajikistan, the organizers, through the medium of art, popular culture and films, hope to build new bridges and break old boundaries between Afghanistan and its neighbours.’