Laila at the Bridge
by Elizabeth Mirzaei and Gulistan Mirzaei
Canada, Afganistan, 2018
synopsis
Laila Haidari survived child marriage and her own traumatic past to battle one of the deadliest problems in Afghanistan: heroin addiction. As the “mother of the addicts,” she must prevail over a crisis of addiction and a corrupt government in a country on the verge of collapse.
In a country offering almost no treatment services despite a crisis of addiction, Laila Haidari took the highly unusual decision to found her own pioneering addiction treatment center and a restaurant where all of the waiters are recovering heroin addicts.
A deeply personal perspective on the global addiction epidemic, the film follows the labor of love of one woman fighting to keep her center alive in the face of physical threats, governmental opposition and the departure of the international community from Afghanistan.
about the directors
Elizabeth Mirzaei moved to Kabul in 2007 as a volunteer photography instructor AINA Photojournalism Institute, where she met her future husband, Gulistan Mirzaei. Together they co-directed films for Al Jazeera English, their latest being For Sardar: The Afghan Journalist. Elizabeth was a director and cinematographer on the BBC’s The Killing of Farkhunda, which was nominated for a Royal Television Society Award, and a cinematographer on the Emmy-nominated documentary, What Tomorrow Brings. Her short films have also been shown before world leaders and key policy makers at the Oslo Conference on Women’s Rights, the International Conference on Afghanistan in London and before an audience of 60,000 at the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park, New York. As a mother to a toddler, she marvels at how much easier it is to have a baby than complete a documentary.
Gulistan Mirzaei was born in Afghanistan and spent much of his life as a refugee in Iran. When the Taliban fell in 2001, Gulistan returned to Kabul to work as assistant to the editor-in-chief at the country’s only independent newspaper, Kabul Weekly. He was mentored by award-winning Afghan director Siddiq Barmak (Osama) and was a line producer for Voice of America. Gulistan has co-directed documentaries for Al Jazeera’s Witness program and worked with the Tiziano Project to teach filmmaking to a students in a Kabul high school. In 2014, Gulistan was awarded the IDFA Bertha Fund for his first feature documentary, Laila at the Bridge. The film was also awarded the Gucci-Tribeca Documentary Fund in 2017. A new immigrant to the United States, he is once again trying to find home.
