Abbas Rezaie, a member of the editorial staff of the Etilaat Roz, the most widely read independent newspaper in Afghanistan, foresees the upheaval that the Taliban’s rise to power will produce and equips himself with a camera with which he will shoot the gradual descent into chaos, the acts of heroism, the crises of conscience and the pits of despair of his fellow journalists, all of which act as a microcosmos of the entire nation’s state of mind. Flashingly, glimpses of everyday life grace the screen, such as the recurrent image of the sun-drenched façade of the newspaper headquarters, and for a moment, despite all the signs of the contrary, the promise of normalcy seems to be right around the corner. Rezaie’s film is an excellent example of raw, necessary, and urgent documentation, a function cinema can continue to assume - not just the images captured in the midst of action on a portable device and instantly broadcasted on social media, but the act of assembling a narrative, whose deceptively simple observational segments conceal an almost irrational courage and, in this case, a cry for help. (Liri Chapelan)