Out of the mouths of rural boys, finding the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin in Afghanistan. After my first year of art school in San Francisco in 1978, I quit, and headed to the Banff School of Fine Arts to do a year long residency program. The instructor Hu Hohn got me hooked on Sufi stories such as, "The Exploits and Subtleties of the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin". Mulla Nasrudin is a Sufi wise-fool, trickster like figure. These books were chock full of funny little contemplative mediation stories. I would read these riding the bus at night and such, to get me through trying days. Later in 2008, I'm in the central highlands of Afghanistan, in Bamiyan, where the colossal Buddha statutes were destroyed by the Taliban. A stark, arid, severe, beautiful landscape, people scrapping by, subsistence farming, much like my grandparents did in Syria. I'm filming scruffy little country boys in a new school built by Western troops. The boys are speaking Hazaragi (a Farsi dialect), via my translator but never having the time to translate responses. At the end of each session, we ask them to tell a joke or a song, something other than the conversation we’ve tried to record. Six months later when I’m back home and the rough transcript translations have been sent to me from Quetta, I discover, lo and behold, then and there were the very same Sufi stories – thirty years later – being told by these scruffy little country boys at Laisa-e-Aali Zukoor boys school, Bamiyan, Hazarajat, Afghanistan.  These few days I’ve been working with my Afghan collaborator, Khadim Ali, he’s based in Sydney currently. We’re trying to work through the time zones, which goes hand in hand with the other displacements of the overarching pandemic time and space. Many thanks to the impeccable Khadim Ali, and to the translator and eternal wunderkind Muzafar Sanji; to Mohammad Zia, our stalwart driver and safe-keeper who deftly transported us over unspeakable rutted goat trails aka roads; and to all who shared with us a mat to rest or sleep on, stories, food, curious minds, and warm hearts.

Though they would eventually kidnap him, the Taliban granted journalist Paul Refsdal unprecedented access. This exclusive documentary shows us a side of the Taliban we have never seen before. Today, the Taliban seem to survive mainly on conviction: "We belong to God and fear no-one". From their mountain hideout, they ambush the daily American convoys, descending into joyous shouts of "Allah Akhbar", when a truck is hit. But a hit on target is rare. And the Americans' response is swift and deadly: a US gunship kills Commander Dawran's second-in command, and Refsdal is told to flee and to return in a month. Dawran escapes unharmed, but his two children are killed.

US military commanders have released a series of reports and recommendations in recent weeks on Afghanistan, and their conclusions have been sobering. General Stanley McChrystal, the US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, has stated that success in the fight against the Taliban cannot be taken for granted, advising the White House that more troops and a new strategy are needed to turn the tide. While the US and Nato face their highest casualty rates of the conflict, widespread fraud in the recent presidential election has raised questions about just what kind of political system US and Nato troops are dying to protect. In the midst of these military and political crises, Rashid Dostum, Afghanistan's most notorious warlord, who has been a powerful player in the country's politics for three decades, returned to the country. General Dostum had been living in exile in Turkey for nine months because of ongoing criminal and human rights investigations against him. However, he was invited back into the country by Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's president, two days before this year's presidential election to take a prominent role in Karzai's election campaign. Karzai hails his warlord allies as national heroes, but what does their return to political prominence mean for Afghan democracy? In the run up to the election, American filmmakers Rick Rowley and Jason Motlagh travelled to Dostum's stronghold in northern Afghanistan to get the first TV interview with him since his return.

Passing the Rainbow looks at ways of subverting the strict gender norms in Afghan society, in areas like performance and film production as well as in daily and political life. A theatre company run by a young teacher in Kabul who moonlights as an actress, a policewoman who also directs action films, an activist with the organisation RAWA who defends the radical separation of State and religion, and Malek, who lives as if she were a boy in order to get a job: these women are the heroines of Passing the Rainbow.