Jennifer Lawrence Produced ‘Bread and Roses’ After Feeling ‘Helpless and Frustrated’ for Suppressed Afghan Women

variety.com:

Matt Donnelly Senior Film Writer Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and her producing partner Justine Ciarrocchi touched down at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday to promote their label’s first ever documentary feature, “Bread and Roses” — a harrowing and emotional look at the lives of women in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

After two decades of American occupation, the nation fell once again to the insurgent group, which moved quickly to strip women of basic rights — simple freedoms like the ability to work, appear in public without a male chaperone and receive an education. “It all just collapsed and a matter of days,” Lawrence recalled to Variety. “I was watching this from America, where Roe v.

Wade was about to be overturned. We felt helpless and frustrated with how to get these stories off of the news cycle and into people’s psyches.

To help people be galvanized and care about the plight of these women.” In the infancy of building their production company Excellent Cadaver, Lawrence and Ciarrocchi pursued Afghan filmmaker Sahra Mani (“A Thousand Girls Like Me”) to help capture the stories of the suppressed women on the ground.