Charlie Chaplin in Kabul

Three months after the end of the war in Afghanistan, when Karzai’s government was being formed, Lech Kowalski followed the then director of the French Cinémathèque Peter Scarlet and his wife journalist wife Katayoun Beglari, who had come to organise film screenings in this culturally deprived city. By the end of their trip, the couple not only managed to set up a travelling cinema, but also rediscovered the spirit and atmosphere that the Lumière brothers had experienced a century earlier: the faces of Afghans
watching films, formerly banned by the fundamentalist regime, gives us an idea of how it was for the very first cinema audiences; a capacity to react that has been lost in our society through sheer force of habit.