As long as I think about it, I can see a brighter future for myself.”
Those words are spoken by Sahar Adish, a 16-year-old student at Charlottesville High School, in the final cut of the still-untitled film she and three other students created through Light House, Charlottesville’s nonprofit media education program for teens. It is the story of her life, a story uncommon for most American youth.
In the first shot, Adish climbs the steps of UVA’s Rotunda while Dave Matthews’ “Stay or Leave” plays over the soundtrack. In close-ups, interspersed with photos of she and her family from her childhood in Afghanistan, she talks about what brought her to Charlottesville. She talks about the fear of living under the Taliban and the relative security of coming to a new country full of possibilities. And she talks about the fear of letting down the parents who sacrificed so much for her. Education, she says, is key to making sure that disappointment never happens.
Toward the end of the film, as Adish’s narration turns to her college preparation, there are shots of her walking down a hall, opening an S.A.T. review book.
The short film was produced for Listen Up!, a national youth media network funded by various high-profile foundations, including the MetLife Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Listen Up! selected Light House and 14 other youth media centers from around the world to be involved in a project called “Beyond Borders.” Each group was given $6,000 to make a film that in some way tackles the themes of fear and security, which, according to the Listen Up! website, www.listenup.org, “may be the most important questions of our time.” While the distribution plans for the films are not yet set, Listen Up! hopes ultimately to feature them in an online film festival and nationally on PBS.
The Light House piece, completed at the end of December, is about Adish and her desire to fulfill her parents’ dreams for her by going to college, specifically UVA—and her fear that she might fail. Nothing particularly dramatic about that, you might say. But it is Adish’s background that sets her story apart, and gives her goals a dimension missing from the hopes of most ambitious high school seniors.
Fear, violence, flight and hope
Adish was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. Her mother, Kamela, was a teacher, and her father, Muhammad Naeem, the head of the department of mining and resources. In 1996, the world of her family—and for most people in Kabul—was radically altered when the city fell to the Islamic Taliban militia, then at war with the Mujahedeen warriors who had fought the Soviet occupation.
The Taliban, which posited itself as a reformist force, are fiercely Islamist and imposed a fundamentalist regime based on their interpretation of the Koran. Amputations and executions were ordered for petty criminals, television was banned, and severe restrictions were passed on the activities of women, who were not allowed to leave home without being accompanied by a male relative. And schooling was completely forbidden.
Adish’s family had always placed a huge premium on education, and the new restrictions were anathema to them. In a quiet way, her mother, a teacher for 25 years, rebelled.
“My mom started to home-school me, and that’s how the neighbors sent their own kids to my house—because my mom was a teacher,” Adish recalls. “And so she started to teach all of us, and after awhile it was a small school.”
Eventually, however, the Taliban discovered the Adishes’ activities. They forced entry into the home, beat some of the students and took her father away to a makeshift jail, where he was imprisoned for several evenings.
“When they entered the house, the kids started shouting and I escaped from the room,” Adish remembers. “So they could not do anything.”
Adish is slight and almost impossibly cheerful, always with a huge smile. Kamela has a similar demeanor. With her daughter acting as a translator—both her parents are working hard to improve their English—Kamela sat perched on the edge of her couch in her small living room in their Downtown neighborhood on a recent winter morning with an attentive, encouraging look on her face as she explained why she continued to teach after the Taliban took power.
“She couldn’t tolerate seeing others not going to school and not having educational opportunities,” Adish says, after an exchange with her mother. “She always hoped her children would be educated, in order to help the community.”
As far as the Taliban’s violent entrance, “she expected it at some point,” Adish says on her mother’s behalf. Explaining further, she says, “When she stayed home, she felt dead, not being in the community and helping otherswhen she couldn’t teach, she felt isolated.”
Immediately following the imprisonment of their father, the Adish family realized it was time to leave. “It was very easy for them to do any kind of tortureto make an example for others,” Adish says, with a polite smile. And, taking only clothes and a few things, Adish, her brothers and her parents fled to the Pakistan city of Peshawar. She was 11 years old.
The family left Kabul at dawn, walking to the bus station. The bus itself was stopped at three or four checkpoints, with the Taliban coming on board to search the belongings of the passengers. The women were asked if they had a ‘Mahram’—the man who was to accompany them everywhere—and the men were checked for beards, which were also required.
“And those who did not have long beards were taken out of the bus andthe bus left with the rest of the passengers,” Adish says. “Sometimes it took us even two hours in some checkpoints depending upon the doubts that the Taliban had on some passengers.”
In Pakistan, Kamela found a job teaching at an Afghani school where Adish was enrolled, but the family’s pilgrimage was far from complete. The streets of Peshawar were filled with Taliban, and after staying in the city for a year, the family moved again, this time to Islamabad, where they lived for three years.
In 2002, after a process spanning two-and-a half years and several interviews, the Adish family was notified—just 15 days before its flight—that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had selected it to go to the United States.
Reunion in a new society
The family was not told why they were selected, nor did they know the state they would be traveling to until the morning of the flight. Nevertheless, according to Adish, their happiness at the news cannot easily be described.
“It was very exciting, it was very exciting because that’s what we wanted,” she says now. “We didn’t know the future in Afghanistan, we didn’t know when we were going to go back there, and the only thing we wanted was a better education. It was good news.”
If the transition to a new society, new customs and a relatively unfamiliar language was difficult, neither Adish nor her mother lets on. And as Adish points out, a life in flux was by then old hat to the family.
“It was very happywe made lots of friends in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, so our life was kind of in change, always in change. We had already adjusted to a changing life,” she says.
While coming to the United States was a dream realized, the family’s good luck was not over. Sahar’s older brother, Baktash, now 25, had left Kabul in 1993 on a scholarship to study English in India, and in the course of the unsettlement caused by the war in Afghanistan, and the family’s flight from the country, they had lost track of his whereabouts. But through an amazing coincidence, last year a friend of the family ran into him at a party in Canada, where he was working as an immigration resettlement counselor. Since the time Baktash, who still lives in Canada, had last seen his family, he had gotten married.
There have been adjustments to make—Adish’s father, for instance, a highly successful engineer in Afghanistan, now works at the Courtyard By Marriott Hotel while he perfects his English. But his daughter, well schooled in English, took to Charlottesville High School easily.
“That was the huge problem for other students who came to Charlottesville, and my father, struggling for English,” she says. “But the rest was better, the rest was fine for me. I took advanced classes and honor classes right away, and I didn’t have difficulties with English.”
Now Adish, who ultimately wants to be a doctor, hopes to matriculate to UVA. “[That] is somewhere I can see my future,” she says. “I think because it is a very good school and it has lots of international students and good teachers and educational systems. And I want to go to medical school, and that’s where I want to study. I don’t want to go out of the city because my family is here, I want to be close to them.”
Her other brothers are also thriving: Honishka, 19, is a student at Piedmont Virginia Community College, while Ali, 12, attends Buford Middle School. Together, they are making their parents’ hopes for them a reality.
“When I see my mom, she taught me at home in a very bad situation where she knew her life was in danger, and now I can see how much they tried hard for our future,” Adish says. “So we should do something better for them. And yeah, that is kind of hard for us to think about it. But as long as we go through and improve our lives, it’s a good victory for them also.”
Story to the screen
In the movie, Adish narrates her powerful story without embellishment. And the production, skillful and conservative, respects that and draws little unnecessary attention to itself. Difficult as it might seem to believe while watching it, however, it wasn’t always clear that the Listen Up! film should center on Adish.
When Shannon Worrell, creative director and co-founder of Light House, first received information about the project last August, she scheduled a brainstorming session with some hand-picked Light House veterans.
“I kind of picked a group of kids that I thought would be interested in the subject and that I thought had the skill and commitment to do it,” she says. Adish and 17-year-old Sanja Jovanovic, who is from the former Yugoslavia, for instance, had previously worked on films through a collaboration between Light House and the International Rescue Committee.
As outlined by Listen Up!, the students were to submit a proposal about a film that would feature the themes of fear and security. Sixteen-year-old Joe Babarsky, another member of the group, took the early lead. According to Worrell, he put the proposal together virtually unaided, outlining a film that would involve the stories of all four students.
As initially conceived, the film was to tackle their individual struggles to meet their parents’ high expectations and their fears that they would fall short in some way. But after Light House submitted some test footage, the group was informed that it needed to limit its focus to either Babarsky or Adish.
“When we sat them side by side, Sahar’s story of loss and aspirations clicked so well with all of us that there was really only one choice,” Babarsky says.
As Adish puts it, “my story was a little more dramatic.”
Yet her colleagues did not realize the full picture right away. Jovanovic says that Adish kept much of her background to herself until well after they settled on her story.
“We were doing shooting in front of the Rotunda, and all of a sudden Sahar started speaking this story that we’d never heard, and she said they had to leave Afghanistan for Pakistan after they took her father away,” Jovanovic says. “And we were like, ‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’ and she said, ‘I thought it was political, I didn’t want to get into politics.’ And all of a sudden the story got another arc, and it was very interesting.”
As shooting continued throughout October and November, the footage began to mount up. At about the same time, Listen Up!, with ambitious hopes for the Beyond Borders project, began bearing down on the group about production values, Worrell says.
“Basically, they wanted it to be broadcast nationally on PBS, so they were showing the footage they were getting from the different media organizations” to PBS and their financial backers, she explains. “The production values weren’t high enough. They wanted perfect, very conventional, very conservative broadcast television production values, like you would see on ‘60 Minutes.’”
To that end Listen Up! sent PBS producer Donald Devet to help the students film the comprehensive interview seen in the final cut. Devet provided aid on a range of technical details, from the type of light reflectors to use to which colored background gels worked best.
All well and good—but the professional help ran contrary to the mission of Light House, Worrell says, which is to “provide enough production help to make the production passable” but not “focus as much on the technology as we do on the stories.”
By telling the students that the project was their story and their idea, Listen Up! was sending a bit of a “mixed message” by insisting upon—and enforcing—production values that were clearly beyond the reach of amateurs working on their own, Worrell says.
It was a contradiction the students also recognized—they even began referring to Listen Up! as “the studio.” Says Luke Tilghman, 17, the fourth member of the Light House group that worked on the picture: “The idea of what they wanted it to be and what we wanted it to be were two very different ideas.”
“You can’t make a film-school kid in one school semester or one three-week workshop,” Worrell says. “You can’t create a great cinematographer or a great film director, technically, in that amount of time. But what you can do is sort of impress upon them the power of telling their own story, and give them the tools and the encouragement to tell their own story.”
She adds, “In my opinion, the hand of the so-called mentor, or the so-called grown-up [in the Beyond Borders project] is greater than I am philosophically comfortable with.”
Listen Up! Network Coordinator Tina Wieboldt says she understood the conflict, but that the organization she represents has its own mission.
“It’s hard for us, because we are raising the bar. Listen Up! is an organization that wants to help youth producers raise the bar in production, so that they are getting the skills they need and they understand what it takes to make broadcast-quality work,” she says. “All our organizations are at different levels in that respect. Some are more experienced and don’t need as much guidance, but at the same time, all our organizations do need a lot of guidance.”
While Devet’s help may not have been totally welcome, all parties agree that the benefits of the collaboration with Listen Up! yielded far more positives than negatives. In addition to the technical support, the group was able to hear from and provide feedback to other teenagers involved in the Beyond Borders project through international conference calls.
“The ability to learn about the intensely varied issues of the other teams in our working group was amazing,” Babarsky says. “Looking side by side at the issues of teen transgendered [people] in New York to Ukrainians living near Chernobyl and kids in the U.K. affected by foot and mouth disease was an incomparable experience.”
However, the students feel above all it’s the friendships formed through the collaboration, and the chance to tell a powerful story, that makes the experience most worthwhile.
“We all thought that the experience was much more important than the product,” Tilghman says. “So we all felt really blessed to be able to work on it.”
“The four kidsare all totally different from each other,” Worrell says. “And they all have said at different times, ‘I never would have done anything with any of these people,’ and they were all friends in the end.
“In that way, it was to me like a utopian experience at Light House, because you always imagine a group of kids each having one different, unique, amazing thing to give. I think it was just a magical combination of kids.”
Roll credits
A film is a moment in time, but a life goes on. For Adish, one of her more immediate concerns is calculus, the only class in which she doesn’t get As. She has pulled her grade up to a B from a C, however.
Adish is incorporating her film work with her studies—she has submitted the Beyond Borders film as part of her application to UVA. She feels very strongly about the finished film, as it conveys a message that is one of her central beliefs. She says she would like for teenagers all over the world to see the film, and take from it the idea that education is important—not something to be taken for granted.
“I would tell them that I didn’t actually value education when I was a young kid,” she says. “But when I stayed at home, I felt the value of it. You don’t value something else unless you lose it. [Education] is the way they could actually help the world and improve the community.”