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Afghan Director Sahra Mani Heads To Cannes With ‘Bread and Roses’ Doc, Produced By Jennifer Lawrence & Justine Ciarrocchi’s Excellent Cadaver

Melanie Goodfellow
·2-min read

The Cannes Film Festival has a long tradition of showing films about world events and this year is no exception.

Afghan director Sahra Mani’s documentary Bread and Roses, capturing the experiences of her country women living under the Taliban since they took control of Kabul in 2021, was announced for its Official Selection on Monday.

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The film will premiere as a Special Screening in the festival.

Jennifer Lawrence and Justine Ciarrocchi produce under the banner of their company Excellent Cadaver, with Mani also taking producer credits. Executive producers are Farhad Khosravi and The Eyan Foundation.

The entire team is expected to be in Cannes for the screening.

The arrival of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban movement in power has had a catastrophic impact on women’s rights, which had been slowly advancing, stripping them of access to education, employment and public spaces.

Women have also borne the brunt of the deteriorating economy under Taliban rule, which has left many families unable to afford basic necessities.

Bread And Roses is described as an unpoliticized tale of resilience as well as “a raw, un-sanitized depiction of the female plight in Afghanistan.”

The film follows three women, desperate to recover their autonomy, who largely tell their stories through their own lenses.

The documentary marks Excellent Cadaver’s third production, after Causeway and the upcoming comedy No Hard Feelings, and its first documentary.

Like many cinema professionals and artists, Mani fled Afghanistan when the Taliban took power in the summer of 2021 and is living now in Europe.

Her previous credits include the 2019 documentary A Thousand Girls Like Me about a young Afghan woman who seeks justice after having been sexually abused by her father for years, which played at HotDocs, Sheffield and IDFA.

At the time of the fall of Kabul, Mani was also working on the long-gestated documentary Kabul Melody about a pioneering music school in the Afghan capital where boys and girls studied together, which she then had to rethink following its destruction by the Taliban.

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