Kabul Beauty 2024

Directed by Margaux Benn

Sofia and Nigina. They’re Afghans, beautiful, proud, best friends, despite themselves and without knowing it - icons of Kabul’s idle youth. Behind the curtains of their beauty salon, the exterior of which has been ransacked by the Taliban, they support a small team and a dream: to protect their last space of freedom. Their salon is situated in central Kabul. Around twenty employees work there, seven days a week. It’s a sanctuary for women: a place where men do not enter. We began filming the day after the Taliban came to power on August 15, 2021. For a year and a half, as the extremists impose new laws on Afghans, especially women, we follow the two friends in their beauty salon and across the Afghan capital: in a park where they are the only ones who still dare to show their faces; on the hilltops where they learn to drive in secret… And then, on the road to exile. The repression becomes too suffocating, too violent. The young women’s quest for lightness becomes a plan of escape…