‘Kabul, Between Prayers’ review: Engrossing documentary follows a lost generation of Afghan men

Dir/scr: Aboozar Amini. Netherlands/Belgium. 2025. 102 mins.

Samim, 23, is handsome and more than a little vain. He has a ready smile and an affectionate, protective relationship with his two younger brothers. He’s dutiful to his aging father, uncomplaining as he shoulders the brunt of the back-breaking work on the family farm. He’s also a Taliban fighter, who dreams of being a suicide bomber and who grins affably as he describes the eternal suffering due to be meted out to ‘infidels’. Meanwhile, his 14-year-old brother Rafi idolises him and knows little of the world except war. With exceptional access, Aboozar Amini’s fascinating observational documentary avoids the easy demonisation of its subjects, instead searching for the humanity, sensitivity and banality in lives dedicated to Allah and guns, in more or less equal measure.

Turns the camera lens into a kind of confessional

This is the second feature documentary (and the second part of a proposed trilogy) from Dutch-Afghan filmmaker Aboozar Amini, a member of the persecuted Hazara ethnic group. It follows Amini’s debut, 2018’s Kabul, City In The Wind, which won a Special Jury Awar at IDFA and the Next Wave Award at CPH:DOX. Kabul, Between Prayers, which employs a similar approach to that of Amini’s debut but was directed remotely because Amini is unable to return to Afghanistan, should enjoy a comparable festival reception following its premiere out of competition at Venice, particularly in documentary specialist events.

While the picture might not match the urgency of Bread & Roses, about female-led protests against the Taliban, or the chilling insight of Hollywoodgate, which captured the Taliban’s rise in the aftermath of the US withdrawal, it’s a powerful and intimate portrait of a lost generation of young Afghan men, As such, it could find a theatrical audience.

On the crest of a sun-baked hill, with the harsh drama of the Afghan landscape behind him, Samim reverently reloads and reassembles his battered M16 assault rifle. He places it at the head of his prayer mat as he prays fervently, pleading with Allah to bring Sharia Law to the world, to accept the martyrdom of the suicide bombers and, weeping openly by this point, to forgive him for not visiting the families of those who gave their lives for the Taliban cause.

The next scene is a sharp contrast: Samim and his fellow Taliban members drive through the streets of Kabul in convoy on their motorbikes, trailing flags and pulling wheelies. Samim, grinning broadly, encourages his friends to look cool. It’s a neat juxtaposition that exposes the contradictions in Samim’s character: on the one hand, he’s a true believer, driven by dedication to the Taliban cause. On the other, he’s an overgrown kid playing with soldiers and relishing the opportunity to show off.

There’s a similar collision in his younger brother Rafi. He’s shown pelting Elyas, the youngest of the three boys, with apples and wrestling; he giggles self-consciously when he is asked whether he has a crush on anyone. Meanwhile, he parrots the same fiery rhetoric as Samim and recites verses from the Qur’an. When pressed, however, he admits that he doesn’t understand any of the words that he has learned by rote.

Amini repeats a technique that was used to powerful effect in his first picture: unwavering close-up shots of his subjects’ faces as they wrestle with tricky questions, which turns the camera lens into a kind of confessional. As we gaze into Rafi’s bewildered eyes when he is asked about his favourite passage from the Qur’an, we start to grasp just how little he knows of the world beyond the farm and his big brother’s influence.

Female characters are largely absent, and those that Amini chooses to show hint at bleak circumstances. Manning a roadblock, Samim flags down a taxi and finds a woman, seemingly intoxicated, in the back seat. She has no home, she says, and, it becomes clear, very little hope. Later in the film, the sound of the street is faded out (the sound design, by Ensieh Layla Maleki, is subtle but effective) and the camera tracks two emaciated girls wandering aimlessly through a snowstorm, ignored by everyone.

Amini’s approach – largely fly on the wall, but with occasional interactions between the filmmaker and the subjects – lacks much in the way of background context. But it is engrossing and insightful in the way it reveals how a generation of young Afghan males has been broken by the forces of fanaticism.