Roya Sadat is joining the foreign-language Oscar race. Afghanistan has submitted her feature debut, “A Letter to the President,” as its pick for the upcoming ceremony, The Hollywood Reporter confirms.
The drama stars Leena Alam as a low-tier female official struggling to “observe modern laws when confronted with ancient tribal rules that condemn another woman to a brutal punishment,” the source summarizes. “Finding herself on the wrong side of the law after being arrested for her efforts, her only hope of redemption is through a direct written appeal to the president.” Sadat penned the script and served as a producer.
“A Letter to the President” made its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in August and will screen at the Busan Film Festival next month.
“Before the Taliban rule, I used to write scripts and direct plays in my school,” Sadat has said. “I wrote my first play when I was all of nine. But once the Taliban came, girls could not attend school. My mother and aunt were determined that our education should not suffer and so we were taught at home,” she recalled. “As soon as the Taliban left, I took up my studies and graduated in law and political science from Herat University. But my heart was in filmmaking. My uncle in Iran sent me DVDs and books on cinema and script writing.”
This marks the second time that Afghanistan has chosen a woman-directed film to rep the country at the Oscars since they started submitting in 2002. The first was Sonia Nassery’s “The Black Tulip.”
Other women-directed films in the running for foreign-language noms include Kirsten Tan’s “Pop Aye,” a drama about a man who is reunited with his childhood elephant, Angelina Jolie’s “First They Killed My Father,” an adaptation of human rights activist Loung Ung’s non-fiction book, and Annemarie Jacir’s “Wajib,” a dramedy about a father and his estranged son.
