“What do you do as an ambassador for Afghanistan when the Taliban takes power and you are a feminist?” asks the page on the website of CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, dedicated to a new doc directed by Natalie Halla, The Last Ambassador.
The Copenhagen fest page also tells us that the country’s ambassador in Austria, Manizha Bakhtari, the the country’s only female ambassador since the Taliban’s takeover, decided to fight back. When the Taliban took power in 2021, she found herself in the bizarre situation of representing, on paper at least, a country whose government she does not support and which is not internationally recognized.
The doc, world premiering at Copenhagen on Saturday, tells her story as an ambassador, as a woman, and as a wife and mother.
“In difficult economic and personal circumstances, Bakhtari decides to stand up to the Taliban and continue her courageous fight for the rights of Afghan women and girls,” a synopsis of The Last Ambassador highlights. “Through her Daughters program, she provides Afghan schoolgirls with the opportunity to educate themselves in secret, while also organizing political resistance against the Taliban on the international stage as an ambassador. In increasingly difficult circumstances, she became one of the most important international spokespersons for Afghan women, true to her motto: ‘Peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice’.”
‘The Last Ambassador’
Courtesy of Golden Girls Film
THR can exclusively debut the trailer for The Last Ambassador, which shows off some of this woman’s energy, dilemmas, and convictions that the film expands on over its 75-minute running time.
“There’s no government, no president,” the ambassador is seen saying in the trailer, for example. “So what’s the point of an embassy?”
The teaser for the movie from production company Golden Girls Film, for which The Party just signed on to handle sales, also shows Bakhtari’s defiant reaction to an order sent to her from her homeland.
Watch the trailer for The Last Ambassador below.