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When director Bill Guttentag teamed up with Roya Mahboob, an Afghan tech entrepreneur and women’s rights activist, to make Rule Breakers, a fictionalised retelling of how Mahboob created Afghanistan’s girls’ robotic team, he said he set out to make an uplifting movie about a group of female long shots who band together to overcome massive challenges and secure an unprecedented victory. All while taking on the patriarchy.
Think, A League of Their Own set in western Afghanistan.
In a conversation with The New Humanitarian, the Academy Award-winning director said he saw the film as exactly that, a sports movie. Something that would have audiences rooting for the characters the way feel-good classics like The Mighty Ducks, Cool Runnings, Field of Dreams and Rudy have for decades.
Guttentag said he saw Mahboob and the girls as “underdogs and people up against tough obstacles”. It was just that they happened to live in 2010s Afghanistan. To him, Rule Breakers was “a universal story” of triumph, like G.I. Jane, The Pursuit of Happyness, and Hidden Figures.
From the outset though, it’s clear that not only is Rule Breakers very much a film set during the US-led occupation of Afghanistan, but it also simply accepts the occupation as a given, perpetuating the dangerous and divisive narrative that only Afghans who support it are the good people. In the Afghanistan of Rule Breakers, the only Afghans who oppose or even question the Western presence are the Taliban.
For all its talk of democracy, Afghan society under the Republic was set up in such a way that questioning Western intentions, raising the number of civilian casualties caused by foreign and Afghan forces, highlighting the so-called ghost schools caused by endemic corruption and the fact that elections were consistently marred with accusations of widespread government-assisted fraud would get you labeled as a Talib: an enemy of the state.
For 20 years we were asked to simply look the other way, and that’s precisely what Rule Breakers does. It goes to great lengths to remain as uncritical of the US-led occupation as possible. Anything even remotely related to the Western presence is clearly handled with kid gloves. When the girls are denied one-week visas to attend a robotics competition in DC, it’s treated almost as an inconvenience of bureaucracy – not as a clear example of the political ironies of a Western occupation predicated in large part on creating educational and employment opportunities for women and girls.
There’s almost a sitcom quality to how a group of young girls being forced to make two 800-kilometre journeys to the highly-fortified US embassy in Kabul is presented. There’s no mention of the litany of invasive security checks and often hostile questioning Afghans had to go through before entering the massive $800 million embassy compound that took up 36 acres of land only a few kilometres from the ancient presidential palace in the centre of the capital.
Afghan politics, however, is not granted nearly the same latitude: There are several references to the corruption and bribery that saw the former Western-backed Islamic Republic consistently ranked as one of the least transparent governments in the world.
The Taliban are clearly billed as the villains of not only the film, but of their vision of Afghan society.
“If the Taliban is mad at you” that means you have changed things, one of the characters says in the hagiographic script co-written by Mahboob’s real-life sister Ilaha.
Rule Breakers wants us to tune out the background noise of global politics and simply cheer on Mahboob and the girls, but as someone who lived through 10 years of the US-led occupation, the film just ended up reminding me of how good the occupation was at creating divisions across Afghan society.
As the film’s heroine, Mahboob consistently reduces Afghanistan to a series of primitive binaries. To the film’s Mahboob, Afghanistan, a country of nearly 40 million, is reduced to an either-or society. Man v woman. Tradition v modernity. East v West. Right v wrong. Past v future. Progress v backwardness. America v Afghanistan. “With us” or “With the terrorists.”
In a bubble
The film does a phenomenal job at portraying a very specific kind of urban Afghan. The ones who existed in a bubble and were able to advance because they had so earnestly bought into the occupation and its many claims of advancement, opportunity, and upward mobility: the type of Afghans who would happily pose next to Hillary Clinton (despite her being Secretary of State when Barack Obama made Afghanistan the world’s most drone-bombed country); or who translated Ivanka Trump’s book into Pashto a year after her father’s Muslim ban; or who clapped alongside Laura Bush at an event during her husband’s illegal occupation of Iraq; or who most recently stood by Meryl Streep, who has never been to Afghanistan, while she declared that “in Kabul a female cat has more freedoms than a woman”.
This is best embodied in a scene half way through the film in which an angry father storms into a joyous gathering to confront Mahboob. The irate father demands to know how a picture of his teenage daughter signing the t-shirt of an American boy at a robotics competition in DC has circulated across Facebook.
Mahboob steps up to him, “This is the Taliban winning, they want our girls to feel dirty and inferior.”
The film’s Mahboob not only fails to directly address the father’s questions, she manages to belittle him and equates his concern for his daughter to the enemy who are later seen carrying out a suicide bombing. Not only does Mahboob not understand the father’s thinking, she shows no interest in doing so. She doesn’t even acknowledge that even in the United States, there are constant debates about the ethics, privacy concerns, and the risks of posting pictures of minors, often without their consent, online.
An American father of a teenage daughter expressing concern about her picture being shared out publicly on social media would be framed as an example of good parenting. And yet, in the world of this film, an Afghan father objecting to his daughter’s picture being posted online without parental approval is somehow painted as backward and in line with the Taliban.
According to this world view, the Taliban and anyone who thinks like them, becomes a threat to society – one made all the more potent by being ambiguous enough to encompass everything from a literal suicide bomber to “our fathers and grandfathers”, whom the Mahboob character accuses of keeping knowledge from girls and women since the country’s inception.
As the Mahboob of this film sees it, both types of men pose an existential and philosophical threat to the Afghanistan the occupation hoped to create.
Standing in front of a classroom in rural Herat, Mahboob declares “this is our Afghanistan,” echoing a long-held sentiment during the occupation that the country must be remade, even though throughout the 20 years of Western intervention the overwhelming evidence showed that the masses were rejecting such visions of neoliberal Western-style democracy.
This is a particularly odd message considering the film was distributed by Angel Studios, a Utah-based studio known for a focus on conservative-leaning heavily Christian-oriented content. The releases of studios like Angel aim in part to help American conservatives reach larger audiences. But Rule Breakers seems to want to further pigeonhole, label, and sideline Afghans who may believe in family values and more traditional ways of life simply because they are Muslim.
A conservative studio
Interestingly, no one involved with the film has publicly had to reckon with the implications of signing a distribution deal with such a studio for a film about Muslim women.
Guttentag insists Angel, which only distributed the eight-million-dollar production, “didn’t ask us to change anything” in the movie. Even still, one has to wonder how a group of Afghan activists and Iranian actors (playing Afghans) thought it would be a good idea to work with a conservative studio when high-profile conservatives have spent decades saying things like, Muslims “smell bad”, “Muslim immigration means more Islamic terrorism”, and Islam is “a religion that states its goal is world domination and the death of infidels”.
The film’s marketing, handled by Angel, has echoes of those exact sentiments.
Afghanistan is reduced merely to an unnamed “place where girls are told their dreams are impossible”, and “a nation where educating girls is seen as rebellion”.
Both phrases reek of the kinds of orientalist and colonialist thought that made a former UK defence minister comfortable enough to publicly refer to Afghanistan as “a broken 13th-century country”, and the wife of a former US ambassador under President George W. Bush to claim that Afghan women only earned their rights “because people from a different culture far away felt sorry for us and sent their soldiers and tons of their money to lift us out of oppression”.
Rule Breakers, which takes place in Herat and centres around Muslim characters, is also the rare largely irreligious film from a studio whose library includes content named for Bible verses, animal documentaries billed as “a celebration of nature and its Creator”, and animated retellings of the stories of Biblical heroes.
Yes, all of the female characters wear a hijab. Yes, the call to prayer can be heard in the background. And yes, there are shots of Herat’s iconic blue-domed grand mosque, but there is almost no depiction of the Afghan characters actually engaging in anything remotely religious.
The filmmakers did, however, find room in the final cut for a scene where the clearly underage girls sneak into a Paris nightclub.
When they are eventually caught by Mahboob’s brother, Ali, it leads to another odd yet telling exchange. The girls, as written in the movie, say they “want more” from their lives. Ali, one of their two Afghan chaperones for the European trip, agrees with their sentiment, saying “we all do”.
What the “more” is that the girls allegedly desire is never made clear, nor does the audience find out who the “we all” is, but the fact that it comes after the underage girls break curfew and eventually end up in a nightclub once again highlights the strange irreligious and unconservative bent of a film about Muslims distributed by a deeply Christian studio.
How eager would Angel Studios be to show young Christian girls desperate to sneak into nightclubs in European cities and seeing that as some kind of act of liberation?
Are the filmmakers implying that a group of adolescent girls from Herat – a city where the sermons of a conservative mullah who vociferously criticised the Western occupation of Afghanistan drew thousands of worshippers each Friday, and where there is an entire museum dedicated to the jihad against Soviet occupation – desire to dance the night away in nightclubs?
Maybe this is why the gender and racial politics of the film also seem to have a strange fascination with the foreign. Throughout the film, we see that Mahboob and her pupils are able to bond with three American, presumably Christian men, but other than Mahboob’s brother Ali, almost all the other Afghan men are depicted as obstacles to their advancement.
They’re all either outright Talibs or pseudo-Talibs like the angry father.
Throughout the film, the relationship between Afghan men and women is shown as adversarial, and yet, whenever the Afghan women and girls are presented with Western men, they are seen as supportive, understanding, friendly, and even worthy of their sympathy. This is brought to light in a scene near the end of the film, where Mahboob and one of the young girls find themselves in a wild car chase with a US soldier who served in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley.
“We heard about it,” is all the girl can say to him, because like audiences in the United States, these girls in urban Herat had only heard of what the occupying forces had dubbed the “valley of death” in Kunar province in news reports.
Like the US audiences, what Mahboob and her mentees probably did not hear about were the accusations of civilian casualties during US operations in an area a US journalist billed the “hardest place” – in the book he won a $5,000 prize named for a former CIA director. In fact, the only mention of civilian casualties in the whole film comes after a suicide bombing, presumably carried out by the Taliban.
When the soldier says he lost his friends in the fighting, the girl somberly apologises to him. It’s a full circle in terms of the film’s dichotomous views of Afghan and foreign men. The film begins with Mahboob being denied access to computers by a male teacher and later a shopkeeper. It nears its end with her protégé, now a novice robot-maker, showing sympathy to a US soldier who says his comrades died in eastern Afghanistan.
Ultimately, Rule Breakers is only likely to once again divide Afghans. Supporters of the occupation, most of whom are now in foreign countries, will see it as a reminder of what was lost on those fateful August days in 2021 when former president Ashraf Ghani ran away in a helicopter and the final US soldiers flew away under the cover of night. On the other hand, opponents of the occupation will simply point to the mentality behind Rule Breakers as evidence of exactly why the occupier and their political stooges in Kabul were always doomed to failure.
