Roya Sadat is a film producer and the first female Afghan film director. She is known for her stories depicting injustices endured by Afghan women.
The filmmaker will direct the world premiere of the opera A Thousand Splendid Suns. The Seattle Opera will stage the work in February 2023. The opera is an adaptation of Afghan American author Khaled Hosseini’s second novel of the same name.
Sadat received the Secretary of State’s 2018 International Women of Courage Award for promoting change with film. She is also the co-founder and co-president of Afghanistan’s International Women’s Film Festival.
Roya Sadat lived under Taliban rule in Afghanistan
Sadat was born in Herat, Afghanistan in 1981, and has been writing plays, stories, and poems since childhood. She was a teenager when the Taliban took over in 1996. As a woman, Sadat was confined to her home under Taliban rule. During this time, she read her father’s books on directing and continued to write.
“Before the Taliban rule, I used to write scripts and direct plays in my school,” recalled Sadat. “I wrote my first play when I was all of nine. But once the Taliban came, girls could not attend school.”
“Six of us sisters, two cousins, my parents and my aunt stayed together,” Sadat described living under the Taliban. “We could not step out unless my father accompanied us…in desperation, my mother cut off my younger sister’s hair, dressed her in boy’s clothes and sent her out with us to do the shopping and run errands.”
Still under the Taliban, Sadat began to work as a woman’s nurse. At significant risk, she would orchestrate small performances of her plays at the hospital.
“As soon as the Taliban left, I took up my studies and graduated in law and political science from Herat University,” Sadat said. “But my heart was in filmmaking.”
Sadat is the mother of two children. She married fellow Afghan filmmaker, actor, and scriptwriter Aziz Deildaar.
Roya Sadat: the first female Afghan film director
Sadat produced her first feature film, Three Dots, in 2004. The film follows a single mother, forced to marry a warlord and smuggle drugs to survive. Three Dots won awards in French and Afghan film festivals.
“Although I did not have any technical knowledge, I managed to shoot that film in the Shindand region in Herat,” Sadat recalled. “After a few days of the shoot, we had to leave the region.”
Sadat established Roya Film House with her sister Alka in 2003. The company has produced over 30 documentaries, tv shows, and films depicting the hardships Afghan women face. In 2006 the filmmaker received a scholarship to study in South Korea at the Asian Film Academy.
In 2007 Sadat directed her first soap opera, Secrets of This House, for Afghan TV station Tolo TV. Her 2009 film Playing with the Taar follows a 17-year-old girl who is forced to marry a man from another ethnic group to end interfamilial hostility. In 2014 the filmmaker produced the series Bahasht Khamosh (Silent Paradise).
The award-winning film A Letter to the President debuted in 2017. The film tells the story of an Afghan woman who retaliates at her abusive husband and later accidentally kills him.
“Cinema can challenge inequality and injustice, it can turn social taboos into discourse, and it can invite people to dialogue,” said Sadat. “Our people need to criticize themselves, to talk about things that are forbidden. I believe that this society needs a revolution of thought and this cannot be done except with the help of cinema.”
Sadat will direct A Thousand Splendid Suns
The Seattle Opera will stage the world premiere of A Thousand Suns as part of its 2022-2023 season. The opera is an adaptation of Hosseini’s 2007 award-winning book.
A Thousand Splendid Suns follows the lives of two women in Afghanistan from the 1960s-1990s. 15-year-old Mariam is forced to leave her rural community to marry a Rasheed, a middle-aged cobbler in Kabul. 14 years later, the Soviets invade and later Afghanistan’s monarchy falls to the Taliban. Rasheed brings home Laila, a wounded and beautiful 14-year-old, and marries her. The two women are cold to each other at first. Eventually, they bond and face their abusive husband.
Composer Sheila Silver and Librettist Stephen Kitsakos developed the adaptation. 11 singers, 2 children, and a full orchestra make up the opera. The Seattle Opera and The American Opera Project co-commissioned the work with the support of various grants and funds.
Read about Khaled Hosseini, author of A Thousand Splendid Suns, here.
