Sahraa Karimi
Sahraa Karimi is an Afghan-Slovak film director, screenwriter, and university lecturer whose work bridges art, politics, and the lived experiences of women under oppression.
She immigrated to the Slovak Republic at the age of 17 in December 2001. She studied film directing and screenwriting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava (Vysoká škola múzických umení, FTF–VŠMU), where she later earned her Ph.D. in Film Studies. She is the first woman from Afghanistan to obtain a doctorate in film studies and the only Afghan filmmaker who is a permanent member of the Slovak Film and Television Academy. In 2012, she received the Slovak National Film Award “Slno v sieti” for her student fiction film Light Breeze.
From 2019 to 2021, Karimi made history as the first woman to be appointed Director General of Afghan Film—Afghanistan’s sole state-run film institution—through a merit-based process. Her tenure marked a significant chapter in Afghan cinema, emphasizing artistic freedom, women’s participation, and the revival of national film archives. However, the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 forced her to flee Kabul and brought about the dissolution of Afghan Film as both a legal and professional entity.
In exile, Karimi continued her academic and creative work across Europe and the United States. From 2021 to 2023, she was a visiting professor at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Rome National Film School). In 2022, she was awarded a filmmaking fellowship at The New School’s Department of Film and Media Studies (New York) for the 2023–2024 academic year and became a member of the New University in Exile Consortium. From February 2023 to January 2024, she served as a Writer-in-Residence with the Artistic Freedom Initiative and a Filmmaker-in-Residence at Westbeth Artists Housing in New York City. She also taught at Bennington College and American University of Afghanistan in Fall 2023 and co-led the seminar “Indigenous Feminism: Afghan & Iranian Women’s Lives Under Theocratic States” at The New School for Social Research in Spring 2024.
In early 2024, Karimi attended the MacDowell Residency Fellowship in the United States. Since Fall 2024, she has been a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Yale University, where she continues to teach and develop new film projects.
Karimi’s filmography includes about 30 short fiction and documentary films that have been screened at numerous international festivals and broadcast by ARTE France, BBC, and Slovak Television. Her documentary Afghan Women Behind the Wheel won over 25 awards worldwide, and her first feature film, Hava, Maryam, Ayesha (2019), premiered in the Orizzonti Competition at the Venice Film Festival and represented Afghanistan at the Academy Awards.
Her current research, supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and conducted under the supervision of Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, explores how Afghan women filmmakers over the past two decades have challenged patriarchal narratives and reshaped cultural understandings of gender and identity.
Karimi is now developing her second feature film, Flight from Kabul—a Slovak,Czech, Finnish and Italian co-production set to premiere in 2027; and a limited series titled A Dance Like This in the Middle of the Field Is My Desire, an Afghan original story with Indian production support. She also served as Executive Producer of the German–U.S. documentary Hollywoodgate, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2023, and is currently the Artistic Advisor and Executive Producer of the forthcoming Canadian feature Kabul–Montreal.