Doc/Fest - Sheffield

The Storm Bird

Sixty year old composer, Zâher Howeida, created a new form of modern Afghan music in the 1960's and became a cultural icon in his country. Now living in exile with his family in Hamburg, Howeida is Afghanistan's last living musical legend and survivor of a time and culture that no longer exist. Despite his isolation and alienation, he still struggles to keep his music alive and pass it on to his children.

Life After the Fall

Shot over four years in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Kasim Abid returns to record the effects of the war on his family. Despite a bloody and protracted invasion, a new sense of hope for a brighter future was shared by all Iraqis. As the patterns of violence and destruction grow more desperate and more commonplace, families like the Abids start to realise the dream of regime change is not going to deliver what it promised. The psychological and emotional impacts of the war are as hard to bear as the physical ramifications and we witness a family coming apart at the seams while their world changes around them for the worse. The effects of the conflict are far reaching and this is one of the few works to take the necessary time to document the evolution of a society caught in the dramatic throes of re-birth.