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.

The fictions-performances inside and outside of Starbucks coffee shops and Disney stores often end with the Reverend being arrested. He calls it stepping into somebody's imagined box. The police call it illegal trespassing. The Reverend claims that social change always begins with civil disobedience and includes as his heroes the civil rights, peace and labor movements.