Double Oscar nominee James Longley, who won the top award at Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival on Saturday with “Mohabat,” will focus next on the Rohingya genocide. Longley – who was Oscar nominated for “Iraq in Fragments” and “Sari’s Mother” – tells Variety at the Czech event, “I’ve already filmed act one of this project, working with Diane Weyermann [who died in 2021] at Participant Media, when they were still around [the company was shut down in 2024]. Next year marks the 10th anniversary of the 2017 genocide.” He adds, “[It’s] a genocide that’s formally recognized as such by the United States, the EU and the British government, yet, surprisingly, no documentary feature has been produced on this subject.
I’m uniquely prepared to make that film.” Longley doesn’t mind being an outsider. His latest, “Mohabat,” is set in Afghanistan. I’m trying to help non-Afghans understand Afghanistan better.
After fighting a war in their country for 20 years, this seems like the least we can do,” he says. He arrived “with a camera in my hand instead of a gun” and was treated as a guest, not an enemy. Mohabat did not want his father to be forgotten, and so he stuck with us patiently throughout two years of filming.” During location scouting, the team visited orphanages filled with children who had lost their parents in the war.
Many of them wanted to tell their stories. That was never an issue,” he says. When I direct a documentary in Afghanistan, Iraq or Gaza and show it to a Western audience, I know I’m taking them to a new place.
In this situation, it’s most appropriate to give them a child’s perspective because [they’re] like a child in those countries, experiencing something new. Especially when working in a “restrictive space.” “Making a film in Afghanistan, either during the war or under the Taliban, with a child as the main protagonist doesn’t make the job more difficult; it makes it much easier. You’ll get permission to make a film about a kid a 100 times before you will get permission to make a film about an adult.” “It would have caused a local scandal if one of the village women had appeared in our film.
She would never have been able to live it down. The issue is not whether women can talk; it’s more that their neighbors would never stop talking about it,” he observes. I’m in no position to make a film about Afghan women, and meanwhile, Afghan women filmmakers are in no position to make the kind of film we made in ‘Mohabat.’” He ended up joining forces with Alex Gibney, who is credited as a producer alongside Longley and Mohammad Sharif Hotak.
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