Last night we gathered together again as one when our film ‘Die. Or Die Trying: Escaping the Taliban’ won a NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Award.
Our successful nomination was in the Public Interest Award’s category for “outstanding public interest journalism upholding the NSW Multicultural Principles”.
Emphasizing the uniqueness and status of the event, the NSW Minister for Multiculturalism Steve Kamper said:
“NSW is still the only state in Australia to recognise multicultural communicators with a stand-alone awards program for media presented in community languages.”
Present on the evening were Addi Road CEO Rosanna Barbero; our Addi Road Ambassador and the executive producer and director of the film, Craig Foster; cinematographer and editor Roberto Arocha; and Tamkin Hakim, Marwa Moeen and Farhat Kohistani, who all featured in the documentary.
In tense, blow-by-blow detail, ‘Die. Or Die Trying’ tells the story of fifteen young Afghan women trapped in Kabul as it falls rapidly to the Taliban. Through a series of whispered, fearful phone calls from Marwa Moeen, Addi Road learnt that a group of female students were in hiding in the city and desperate to escape.
Using WhatsApp messages, Marwa sent us a plethora of scattered identity papers and blurry iPhone snaps of passports provided by the young women who were trapped in a room with her as the Taliban celebrated outside, firing their rifles on the street, pounding on doors looking for wives and sexual prizes.
Back in Sydney, Addi Road quickly allied itself with a team of community activists to piece together the puzzle of panicked communications that were coming in from Marwa as we sought to help the young women gain visas and permissions to enter Australia.
Addi Road CEO Rosanna Barbero and Office Manager Gurwinder Kaur working at night to sort through the confusing array of papers and passport images sent from Afghanistan on 24 August 2021. Photo by Mark Mordue.
It was a task set against a racing clock. And at times it felt hopelessly messy and complicated, their photos and identity papers strewn across the floor of the Addi Road office.
As Addi Road, Craig Foster, Tamkin Hakim and many others were working 24/7 in Sydney to help them, the young women set out under cover of darkness to make a life-threatening journey through Afghanistan and across international borders. It was an escape all the more astounding for involving not just one or two individuals, but fifteen young women aged from their mid-teens to their very early 20s, extremely aware of their likely fate under the Taliban as their country dissolved into chaos.
The film maps all this through first-person accounts from the young women involved, Marwa Moeen, Farhat Kohistani and Farhat Nazari principle among them.
Die. Or Die Trying: Escaping the Taliban also includes interviews with Addi Road CEO Rosanna Barbero and Tamkin Hakim back in Sydney, as well the Kurdish refugee and artist Mostafa ‘Moz’ Azamitabar, whose assistance would be critical in translating the documents that had arrived so haphazardly through Marwa’s WhatsApp communications. Craig Foster would also help in a big way through his direct lobbying with senior government ministers, negotiating the bureaucratic and political obstacles, and the life-or-death realities of time passing.
It’s important to emphasize the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Award is not simply for this film alone, as wonderful and intense as it is, put together on a shoestring by its committed collaborators Craig Foster and Roberto Arocha.
The award is also for all the work they – and everyone – did before and after this film was independently made, from the public showings organised at community events across Australia through to joyful screenings in schools where Marwa and Farhat and the other young Afghan women shared their stories and lives with students just like them.
At many such events, after seeing the film and speaking with them in QandA sessions, students would line up to hug their Afghan sisters and cry and laugh together. One world come together in the truest ways.
In this respect the film is about many things … an urgent journey to safety, and a journey of becoming too, awakening us to refugee realities and offering understanding and connection that has enriched everyone involved. A journey of a lifetime for all involved, and a triumph for what community can mean and do at every level.
We thank the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Award for this recognition.
Rosanna Barbero and Craig Foster accept the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Award for ‘Die. Or Die Trying: Escaping the Taliban’ from Stephen Kamper, NSW Minister for Multiculturalism. 24 August 2023.
L-R: Farhat Kohistani, Craig Foster, Roberto Arocha, Marwa Moeen, Rosanna Barbero, Julia West, Tamkin Hakim and Pauline Lockie at the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Awards
Marwa Moeen in ‘Die. Or Die Trying: Escaping the Taliban’
Die. Or Die Trying: Escaping the Taliban is available for direct viewing on YouTube here