House No. 30, Kabul

This short film is a continuation of Abbas Rezaie's award-winning feature documentary, The Etillaat Roz. It tells the story of the final weeks of the newspaper in Kabul when the Taliban recaptured the city and gives a glimpse into what happened to the editorial staff who were forced to flee - seeking refuge in Europe and the US - while keeping the newspaper active online. The narrative of the film will be structured around the reflections of Abbas Rezaie, who happened to be in the middle of a turbulent historical time with his camera. He wakes every morning, turns on his camera, and starts to capture the fragmented reality of the office and a country on the verge of collapse. He will reflect on his fears, hopes, the future, what would happen the next day, and the past, when his father took him to a cinema in Iran to watch a documentary about the collapse of the Afghanistan government in the 1970s. Abbas describes it as an unspoken side of the collapse from a local's point of view. The short film is a "long poem before the collapse" and a reflection of someone standing in the middle of an unfolding historic event.