Sahra Mani: Last News

Addie Morfoot Contributor During the lead-up to the Academy Awards, it’s common for an A-list celebrity to join a feature documentary as an executive producer. The addition of a boldface name to a doc title creates buzz and involves little to no legwork for the celebrity. But ever since the doc marketplace fell into disarray several years ago, an increasing number of celebrities have stopped simply slapping their names onto titles.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Jennifer Lawrence produced the new Apple TV+ documentary “Bread and Roses” despite her family and friends encouraging her not to get involved with the project as it centers on the Taliban. The documentary, directed by Sahra Mani, premiered at Cannes earlier this year and follows three women as they fight to recover their autonomy amid Taliban oppression following the fall of Kabul in August 2021. “My first reaction was to do what the Taliban did not want us to do, which was to give access and facilities to the people on the ground to capture what was happening in real time,” Lawrence recently told “CBS Mornings” about producing the documentary.

Jennifer Lawrence is on the red carpet to promote a new documentary that she helped produce!

A casual queen!

Jennifer Lawrence steps out in a woven dress with a detailed back for the Bread and Roses photocall during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival over the weekend.

Late last month the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to condemn the Taliban for systematically depriving Afghan women of their rights, demanding the country’s fundamentalist Islamic rulers provide “full, equal, meaningful and safe participation of women and girls” in Afghan society.

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.”

Jennifer Lawrence is turning heads with her stunning look at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

Catherine Bray Afghan director Sahra Mani‘s well-received “A Thousand Girls Like Me” documented the quest for justice of a young incest victim, and now, Mani has returned with a similarly hard-hitting documentary, “Bread and Roses”, premiering in the official selection of Cannes as a special screening. Produced by Jennifer Lawrence, this film tackles an urgent and timely topic through a committed on-the-ground perspective, capturing the experience of three people, Zahra, Taranom and Sharifa, whose lives as they knew them were effectively ended when the Taliban seized control of Kabul in 2021. The film benefits from introducing a voice-of-god narrator or viewer stand-in to guide the audience through an arm’s-length survey of the situation. This is scrappy, up-close and personal filmmaking — which is not to say that anything here is hard to follow or purposefully obscure. It’s more that Mani trusts both her audience and subjects to engage with the actuality of what is happening without the need for intrusive formatting.

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