Dissident Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his filmmaker children Maysam and Hana, alongside producer of TV series Have I Got News For You Jimmy Melville, have called on the UK government to resettle Afghanistan’s creatives.
They spoke during a hearing with the cross-party culture, media and sport (CMS) committee today, highlighting the danger Afghan creatives are facing in their home country,
“The Taliban is an anti-cultural movement… Bringing these people here is not just saving the life of individuals. It’s saving culture.” said Makhmalbaf, drawing on several examples of artists who have been killed in Afghanistan.
“There are other people who want to come, and these people [creatives] are not more important, but they are higher risk because they are visible, and they are high profile, and they are easily spotted,” said Melville.
Makhmalbaf moved to London in 2011, having experienced attempts on his life from the Iranian state while living in Iran and France. His children Maysam and Hana also live in London.
Makhmalbaf’s credits include Cannes premiere Kandahar, which is set in Afghanistan. The Makhmalbaf family have made 12 films about the country. They mounted a campaign to try and evacuate a list of 800 artists, across filmmaking, dance, writing and music, just ahead of the Taliban’s takeover in 2021.
Gabbeh director Makhmalbaf said he wrote letters to 300 film festivals and knocked on doors of different governments for support, to no avail, until the French government agreed to take 279 creatives in the last week before the takeover, in August 2021. To date, the family has facilitated 398 artists to leave Afghanistan: 301 creatives evacuated to France, 80 to Germany, and 17 welcomed by US universities.
As of June this year, the UK parliament says around 29,000 Afghan people have been resettled in the UK, with half arriving around the time of the 2021 evacuation, when UK troops abruptly left the country.
Makhmalbaf believes there are around 300 artists and families of artists still in Afghanistan where their lives are at risk, many with connections to the UK, such as through relatives, but have been unable to access the Home Office’s Afghan Resettlement Programme.
Hat Trick producer Melville became involved with the family’s campaign after seeing a documentary by Hana Makhmalbaf, Busan premiere The List, about the 2021 fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Melville has attempted to lobby the UK government on the issue of resettlement of the Afghan artists, but feels the previous Conservative ruling party became “caught up in the bureaucracy of it… Some government agency should take a look at this, and see it as a special case, along the lines of the Ukrainian evacuation. This is not about immigration and asylum, the mood music around that I know is problematic, this is about humanitarian evacuation.”
He added: “These people are well documented. We can prove what they do, we have their work, we can show you what they’ve done and their contacts here.”
At the recent Labour party conference, Melville said: “There were a lot of expressions of wanting to help. It’s how do we crystalise that in a way that we can navigate the bureaucracy, without breaking any rules.”
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