Filming with a largely female crew in Afghanistan was never going to be easy. Especially when the story involves a naked woman roaming around. But even constructing an entire Afghan village in neighboring Tajikistan had its perils – the 38 actors of “Wolf and Sheep,” had to traverse Taliban controlled territories just to reach the set.Such are the circumstances for the making of “Wolf and Sheep,” the debut feature by Kabul-based Shahrbanoo Sadat and the first film by a female Afghan director to be selected at Cannes Film Festival.A Danish production, “Wolf and Sheep” will screen at the Directors Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs). The film blends realism and magic in the tale of shepherd children and their traditions and believes, based on the real rural community where the director grew up.One such belief is the Naked Green Fairy, a female who disguises herself as the Kashmir Wolf and who removes the cruelty from the world by taking it away to the mountains. That depiction alone probably means the film will never be shown in Sadat’s native country, but the 26-year-old is already used to exposing her culture abroad, having presented her first short fiction work “Vice Versa One” at Cannes in 2011.Now running her own production company Wolf Pictures in Kabul, Sadat developed “Wolf and Sheep” with the Cannes Cinéfondation Residency, for which she was selected back in 2010, age just 20. Produced by Denmark’s Katja Adomeit of Adomeit Film, the film follows a group of 11 year olds who live divided by the sexes in rural Afghanistan, and who try to understand the world by inventing stories, some of which turn in to real belief.While the boys fight with wolves, the girls smoke and play wedding games. The story is propelled when the mother of Oodrat remarries and old man, and now alone, her meet an outsider named Sediqa that the group believe is cursed.The Directors’ Fortnight runs as a parallel section of the main Cannes Film Festival, and is led by Artistic Director Edouard Waintrop. The aim is “to bring new talents to the fore, surprise audiences with new and unknown facets of known talents, to vary the pleasures, in a word, to show what’s most exciting in world cinema and what rises to the top among the new trends,” says Waintrop.“Wolf and Sheep” follows Panjshir, Afghanistan-born male director Siddiq Barmak’s “Osama” (2003), which previously screened at Cannes in 2003, winning the AFCAE Award, Cannes Junior Award and Golden Camera – Special Mention.
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