Emerging Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat delights with an 80s-set mixture of realism and inspired Bollywood-style musical, set on the streets of Kabul.

Premiering at Cannes’ prestigious Director’s Fortnight, the second feature from rising Afghan writer/director Shahrbanoo Sadat is a follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 debut, Wolf and Sheep. Qodratollah Qadiri stars as orphan Qodrat, a daydreaming 15-year-old selling movie tickets on the streets of Kabul in the late 1980s. Taken to a Soviet orphanage by police, Qodrat and his fellow teenagers soon find themselves defending their home in the wake of the Islamist government takeover.

Mixing gorgeously lensed realism with folklore and unlikely, affectionate bursts of Bollywood musical, Sadat sensitively evokes both the interior world of her protagonist and the turbulent political climate of the era, successfully crafting a humanist experience with a dash of fantasy.

“Balances a clear-eyed re-creation of a teen’s time in an orphanage with a certain nostalgia for childhood innocence.” – Variety